LEWIS BOBRICK ANTIQUES

Signed Betty Woodman (impressed stamp) cookie jar C 1980.  11 " <p>

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A ceramic sculptor who is one of the modernist artists responsible for potterys' inclusion as 'fine

   art', Betty Woodman, at age 76, had a retrospective exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in

   2006.  Her work, with its brightly colored designs and loosely painted images is closely tied to

   abstract painting, and her methods, including the use of cake decorating equipment as tools, is

   certainly not conventional.

   The Met exhibition was described as "less a retrospective than a sprawling installation that

   extended to the rafters of the awkward, box-shaped, special exhibitions gallery in the Wallace

   Wing. . . .the visual excitement, the raucous extravagance, audacity and joyful eccentricity of

   Woodman's recent installations overwhelmed the small selection of early work, . . ." (195)

   Woodman trained from 1948 to 1949 in western New York State at the School for American

   Craftsmen at Alfred University.  She was especially taken with pottery from the Italian culture

   such as Etruscan earthenware, and since then has created pottery reflecting not only Italian

   influences but work from the Tang Dynasty, Okinawa, India and the Baroque period in Europe. 

   She also affiliated herself with the New York branch of the Pattern and Decoration movement.

   In 1953, she married George Woodman, and they moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico where

   he attended art school for abstract geomentric painting and she created pots using her backyard

   adobe kiln.

   Upon his graduation they moved to Boulder, Colorado where he taught at the University, and

   she set up a ceramic studio.  She also taught pottery in community centers and from 1978 to

   1998 at the University of Colorado.  In 1980, the couple also bought a loft in New York City, and

    spending much time there, were influenced in their art expression by iconoclastic movements

   that rebelled against the austere, prevailing Minimalism.

   In 1982, Woodman did her first installation, which was a collaboration with Cynthia Carlson and

   "juxtaposed her ceramic tiles and Carlson's wallpaper.

   Overall her career is a mixture of "sculpture, painting and architecture to create a certain

   amalgum of her own." (199)

   Michael Duncan, "Woodman's Decorative Impulse", Art in America, November 2006, p. 193.