“Still growing and blooming…”: Betty, George, and Francesca Woodman is the first institutional exhibition to bring together more than fifty years of ceramics, paintings, and photographs by artists Betty and George Woodman and their daughter Francesca. For the Woodmans, art was not only a profession; it was a family language. Betty met George in a ceramics class she was teaching in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1950, and over their more than sixty-year marriage, they built a life centered on art, travel, and making.
Bringing together the work of Betty, George, and Francesca, the exhibition considers how the rhythms of everyday life, travel, and shared visual experiences took shape in three distinct artistic practices—vastly different in duration, focus, and medium. Betty Woodman (b. 1930, Norwalk, CT; d. 2018, New York City) is celebrated for exuberantly colorful ceramics that draw on the history of the medium while pushing the vessel into new sculptural and architectural forms. George Woodman (b. 1932, Concord, NH; d. 2017, New York City) worked across painting, photography, and installation, exploring ideas drawn from philosophy, mathematics, and the history of art. Francesca Woodman (b. 1958, Denver, CO; d. 1981, New York City) created a widely admired body of photographs, best known for intimate, small-scale gelatin silver prints in which the body interacts with architecture, objects, and space.
Seen together, their works reveal how family experiences—from visiting the Acropolis to tending the flower garden—gave rise to mutual interests in Classical art, architecture, and mythology; the nude figure; perceptual systems of repetition and rotation; and the domestic sphere as a space of creative freedom. Through the lens of one family, “Still growing and blooming…” offers a multigenerational and multidisciplinary view of twentieth-century art, asking how artistic ideas take shape not only through movements and institutions, but through the intimate exchanges, routines, places, and relationships of everyday life.
The exhibition is accompanied by a substantial catalogue, co-published by Rizzoli and the ICA/Boston, featuring newly commissioned essays from Brooke Holmes, Anna Katz, and Nancy Princenthal, alongside never-before-published archival materials and family photographs and artist reflections from Ann Agee, Sarah Crowner, Steve Locke, Shala Miller, Sara Pfau, and Collier Schorr.
