Woodman had her first one-person exhibition at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska in 1970. She taught at the University of Colorado, Boulder from 1978-1998 and later became Professor Emeritus. When she and George bought a loft in New York City in 1980, she decided to stop making functional pottery and began showing her sculptures at contemporary galleries in New York and Los Angeles.

‍Numerous awards followed including National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships in 1980 and 1986. In 1992, Woodman had solo exhibitions at the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut and Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia. She received a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship at the Bellagio Study Center, Bellagio, Italy in 1995 and had her first major international solo museum exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam in 1996. From 1998 until her death, she lived and worked between New York and Antella. Woodman was the subject of the first solo exhibition by a living woman artist at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York in 2006. She received honorary doctorates from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 2006, University of Colorado in 2007 and Rhode Island School of Design in 2009, as well as the Brooklyn Museum Modernism Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2008. Woodman completed major commissions at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing for the State Department’s Art in Embassies program in 2008 and the U.S. Courthouse in Jefferson City, Missouri through the General Services Administration in 2012. Major solo exhibitions followed at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London in 2016 and K11 Art Foundation, Shanghai in 2018.

Betty Woodman’s work is included in more than fifty public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Victoria and Albert Museum, London, England; Musée des Arts Decoratifs Paris, France; and Museu Nacional do Azulejo, Lisbon, Portugal.

Courtesy Woodman Foundation