News / Francesca Woodman / Museum Exhibitions

On View

Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron
Portraits to Dream In

Through June 16, 2024
National Portrait Gallery, London
www.npg.org.uk

Photographers Francesca Woodman (1958–1981) and Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–1879) lived a century apart—Cameron working in the United Kingdom and Sri Lanka from the 1860s onwards, and Woodman in the United States and Italy from the 1970s. Both women explored portraiture, going beyond its ability to record appearance, and using their own creativity and imagination to suggest notions of beauty, symbolism, transformation, and storytelling. Showcasing more than 150 rare vintage prints, this exhibition presents an overview of both artists’ careers, and suggests new ways both to look at their work and to examine how photographic portraiture was created in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Closed

Francesca Woodman in
RE/SISTERS: A Lens on Gender and Ecology

October 5, 2023–January 14, 2024
Barbican Centre, London
www.barbican.org.uk

RE/SISTERS features selections from approximately fifty emerging and established international women and gender nonconforming artists working across the fields of photography and film. The exhibition explores the relationship between gender and ecology, highlighting the systemic links between the oppression of women and the degradation of the planet. Spanning a range of themes, from extractive industries to the politics of care, the works on view address the existing power structures that threaten our increasingly precarious ecosystem. Work by Francesca Woodman is included.

Closed

Francesca Woodman in
The Performative Self-Portrait

May 13–November 12, 2023
RISD Museum, Providence, Rhode Island
risdmuseum.org

The Performative Self-Portrait explores the body as material and medium and photography as a vehicle with which to consider the ways that artists use self-portraiture to enact the self, question history, and articulate identity. Made between 1930 and the present, the exhibited photographs include both new acquisitions and older works on view for the first time. Work by Francesca Woodman is included.

Closed

Francesca Woodman in
The Rose

July 29–October 28, 2023
Lumbar Room, Portland, Oregon
www.lumberroom.com

The group exhibition The Rose, titled in homage to Jay DeFeo’s monumental painting of the same name, presents work by forty-four artists, from the 1960s to the present, to propose a circular genealogy of collage. The show imagines an extended family of artworks in which kinship is forged through association, to amplify themes, provide context through similarity and difference, and explore feelings and language as a collective effort. Work by Francesca Woodman is included.

Closed

Francesca Woodman
Obras de la colección Sammlung Verbund, Viena

March 8–May 7, 2017
Patio Herreriano, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Español, Valladolid, Spain
museoph.org

This exhibition explores work from the Sammlung Verbund, Vienna, by Francesca Woodman (1958–1981). Woodman’s stark, black-and-white photographs explore an intense curiosity and ambivalence toward the feminine self, while her often playful, surreal, and symbolic gestures also demonstrate her ability to incorporate elements of humor into her otherwise sober iconography.

Closed

Francesca Woodman
On Being an Angel

September 5–December 6, 2015
Moderna Museet, Stockholm
www.modernamuseet.se

Francesca Woodman (1958–1981) created a body of fascinating photographic works in a few intense years before her premature death. Her work explores gender, representation, sexuality, and the body. This traveling exhibition presents more than a hundred photographs and one video around these themes, including several self-portraits.