Amy Sherlock and Judith Tannenbaum on Betty Woodman

Join us at 7 PM on Thursday, December 8 at SculptureCenter for Amy Sherlock and Judith Tannenbaum on Betty Woodman, a conversation discussing the artist’s life and work during the 1990s, a crucial period in her career. Woodman (1930–2018) is recognized not only as one of the most important artists to work in ceramics—and one of those most responsible for its inclusion in contemporary art historical discourse—but also as an iconoclastic figure whose advances in several mediums made her a major voice in postwar American art. She transformed the functional history of clay into a point of departure, engaging in bold formal experiments in which she acknowledged the central role of the vessel even as she deconstructed, reassembled, and expanded upon it.

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In this program, writer Amy Sherlock, who interviewed Woodman for Frieze in 2016, will speak to the artist’s experimentations with ceramic-based art, which fused the boundaries between sculpture and painting. Judith Tannenbaum, board member at the Woodman Family Foundation, will touch on major milestones in Woodman’s career, underscoring her influence on postwar American art. The conversation will be moderated by Kyle Dancewicz, Deputy Director at SculptureCenter.

Amy Sherlock is a writer, curator and Features Editor of The World of Interiors, based in London. Between 2011–2021, she was Deputy Editor of Frieze magazine and, between 2016–19, she curated the annual Frieze Art and Architecture Conference, which explored, amongst other things, how art exists in the domestic sphere. She has written extensively about the relationship between the fine and decorative arts, with a particular emphasis on ceramics and textiles, and their changing status over the course of twentieth-century art history. In 2016, she interviewed Betty Woodman ahead of Woodman's first institutional solo presentation in the UK (at the age of 76)––a formative conversation to which she has made reference in numerous subsequent pieces, including a recent essay for the catalogue of Strange Clay, a major ceramics exhibition currently on display at London's Hayward Gallery.

Judith Tannenbaum is a contemporary art curator who has organized numerous exhibitions of painting, sculpture, video, and interdisciplinary work. She is particularly interested in the relationship between visual art and performance and how fine art, craft, and design intersect. She held senior positions at the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania (from 1986 to 2000) and was the Richard Brown Baker Curator of Contemporary Art at the RISD Museum from 2000 to 2013. Recent projects include Whitman at 200: Art and Democracy (2019) and A New View Camden (2021). She is currently Project Curator for Rising Sun: Artists in an Uncertain America, which opens at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in March 2023. A board member of the Woodman Family Foundation since 2003, Tannenbaum met Betty and George Woodman in the mid-1980s. She organized exhibitions of Betty’s work at the ICA Philadelphia and at the RISD Museum.