Betty Woodman, Elizabeth Woodman

1930Born Norwalk, Connecticut

2018 Died New York, New York

EDUCATION

1948-1950 Alfred University, School for the American Craftsman, Alfred, New York

PRIMARY WORK EXPERIENCE

1950—Studio artist

1979 Faculty, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado 

1998 Professor Emeritus, University of Colorado, Boulder

BIOGRAPHY

Betty Woodman began her career in the 1950s as a production potter. Later, as a studio potter Woodman worked with many domestic forms including baskets, dinnerware, pillow forms, pitchers, and vases. She is known for her sculptures which are anchored by a vessel form: either one that pours or contains. Woodman's pieces are typically made using white earthenware clay.

Her work is often influenced by her memories of paintings, landscapes or architecture seen in her travels. Throughout her career, Woodman returned to the vase form, repeatedly deconstructing and reconstructing this form in her sculptures. The vase connects her work to art historical still life vase motifs and is the form that anchors her work in the vessel based realm of clay. Gradually her pieces became sculptural forms with colorful painterly surfaces. Often she made compositions of two or more objects that grew from the deconstruction of similar pieces, their parts interchanged with abstracted new sculptural objects. A hallmark of Woodman’s work in various media is her love, understanding and inventive use of color.

In 1985 she began working with printer Bud Shark to produce monotypes, woodcuts, and lithographs. These are large and created with the same intense color and movement seen in her ceramics. At this same time, she began a series of large paintings to be shown as part of her ceramic installations. Although each installation contains a ceramic vessel, over time the painting became the major element in her work.

Woodman presents the vase, pillow form pitcher, and other domestic forms in ways that explore form and color challenging the traditional borders of the craft. Woodman has never drawn a line between art and craft and employs the best of each area in her work.   

An interview with Betty Woodman conducted April 22 and April 29, 2003, by John Perreault, for the Archives of American Art’s Nanette L. Laitman Documentation Project for Craft and Decorative Arts in America is available at www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-woodman-13297.