History
The residency home and studios belonged to artists Betty Woodman (1930-2018) and George Woodman (1932-2017) for more than 50 years. Love of beauty was at the heart of their lives and art.
About Betty Woodman
BETTY WOODMAN (neé Abrahams) (1930-2018) was a renowned American ceramics artist. Born in Norwalk, Connecticut, she attended the School for American Craftsmen at Alfred University in New York from 1948 until 1950. She began her career as a production potter. In 1951, she traveled to Italy and worked as an apprentice in the studio of ceramic artist, Giorgio Ferrero. The trip laid the foundation for Betty’s lifelong love affair and engagement with Italy and Italian culture. In 1966, she returned to Florence on a Fullbright Scholarship and two years later, she and her husband George Woodman bought a farmhouse in Antella, where the couple and their two children spent much time.
Betty taught at the University of Colorado, Boulder from 1978 to 1998. In 1980, the Woodmans established a second residence in New York City. The direction of Betty’s works changed dramatically at this time. She moved away from functional pottery toward abstract ceramic sculpture, exhibiting it in contemporary art galleries in New York and Los Angeles. Betty’s success culminated in a retrospective show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2006, the first such retrospective for a living, female ceramicist, and a major exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in 2016. Betty Woodman’s work is included in more than fifty public collections. After retiring from teaching, Betty lived and worked in New York and Antella.
Here I saw some kind of alchemy that was not related to the use of the kiln. It was about the use of color and the painting of forms. Here, too, I suddenly became aware of the landscape and of the cypress trees, and of learning a foreign language by going to the market…I fell in love with it. The landscape in Colorado, where I lived for 40 years, was beautiful where humans had not touched it. And the landscape in Tuscany is beautiful because humans have touched it.
Betty Woodman
About George Woodman
GEORGE WOODMAN (1932-2017) was an American painter, photographer, and printer. Influenced by classicism and modernism, he began his career as an abstract painter and later turned to Pattern and Decorations as well as figurative work. After receiving a BA in Philosophy from Harvard University and an MFA in Painting from the University of New Mexico, in 1956 George started teaching painting and philosophy at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he remained until his retirement in 1995.
George completed large-scale public art commissions with ceramic tiles in Detroit, Denver, and Buffalo. His work is represented in major museum collections and was exhibited across the world, including MOMA and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Palazzo Pitti in Firenze, Italy, and Museo del Chopo in Mexico City. A retrospective exhibition of George’s paintings was held at the Bemis Center in Omaha, Nebraska in 2006.
In both his photographs and paintings, the viewer senses the delicate magic between line, form, and shape. A romantic and heroic fascination with both time and beauty is eloquently distilled into Woodman’s work.