Betty Woodman

Polka Dot Skirt

2011

Betty Woodman was a leading American ceramist whose dazzling inventions with form and color moved beyond the traditional domain of craft. Her work is crucial to larger discussions about gender, craft, and modernism in 20th-century America. In 2008, Woodman was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Brooklyn Museum. She has been honored as National Academician by National Academy Museum and School of Fine Arts in New York and is the recipient of the prestigious Dunwiddie Prize from that same institution. She holds Honorary Doctorates from Rhode Island School of Design; Nova Scotia College of Art and Design; and the University of Colorado, Boulder, where she served as Professor of Fine Arts for many years. Other honors and awards include the Premio Internazionale Vietri sul Mare, Fondazione Museo Artistico Industriale in Salerno, Italy; the Visionary Award of The American Craft Museum in New York; a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship from he Bellagio Study Center in Bellagio, Italy; a Distinguished Research & Creative Lectureship, University of Colorado, Boulder; the Colorado Governor’s Award in the Arts; two NEA Fellowships, and a Fulbright-Hays Scholarship to Florence, Italy. Woodman’s work has been shown around the world in exhibitions throughout the US, and in France, Italy, Holland and Japan. Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art; Boston Museum of Fine Arts; Brooklyn Museum; Metropolitan Museum of Art; Smithsonian Institute; National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Whitney Museum of American Art; the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam; Victoria and Albert Museum in London; the ICA London; and numerous others. In 2006, “The Art of Betty Woodman,” a retrospective of Woodman’s work, was shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.