Betty Woodman
BIOGRAPHY
Betty Woodman (1930-2018) was an American artist, internationally recognized as one of the most important ceramic sculptors. Woodman began her work with clay in a high school pottery class. She studied at Alfred University in Alfred, NY from 1948-1950, and began her began professional ceramics career as a production potter with the aim of creating objects to enhance everyday life. Woodman began teaching at the University of Colorado Boulder in 1979 and was made professor emeritus in 1998.
Since her early days as a production potter, the vase has become Woodman’s subject, product, and muse. In deconstructing and reconstructing its form, she has created an exuberant and complex body of sculpture. Its signature is its reflection of a wide range of influences and traditions and an inventive use of color. As she has written, “The centrality of the vase in my work certainly implies a global perspective on art history and production. The container is a symbol — it holds and pours all fluids, stores food and contains everything from flowers to our final remains.”
Over the course of her lengthy career, Woodman has had numerous solo exhibitions at museums and galleries internationally, including Betty Woodman: L’allegra vitalità delle porcellane at the Museo delle Porcellane in the Palazzo Pitti near the Giardino di Boboli in Florence, Italy during 2009 and 2010; her retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, The Art of Betty Woodman, 2006; as well as Theatres of Betty Woodman at the Museu Nacional do Azulejo, Lisbon, 2005. Her many awards and honors include a Fulbright-Hays Scholarship to Florence Italy in 1966; National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships in 1980 and 1986; a New York Foundation for the Arts grant in 1985, and a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship at the Bellagio Study Center, Bellagio, Italy, 1995.
artist statement
My work for the past 50 years or so has been involved with a sort of “setting the stage” for a performance. At times the theatrics happened at breakfast, dinner or tea; at times the scenery has included flowers in vases in architectural settings. References to other works of art have also always been present as a constant in my practice. Such work is intended to be read with the inclusion of our knowledge of other works of art. These have ranged from Korean folk art painting to Matisse and Bonnard to Classic Greek and Roman vases. Recently, I have been looking at Roman Frescos and various other wall paintings where images of architecture are painted on the actual walls. These give the illusion, with their columns and windows, of architecture within architecture. I have also observed how often these frescos include images of vases…There are a series of cross-references in ceramic, wood, glaze and paint which return us to the “theatrical” domain of the wall pieces. We go to the theater to see plays and “play” is fundamental to the spirit of my recent work. Character, mise en scene, costume, plot and denouement are all important here. I am playing with play.
- Betty Woodman, 2010
