Francesca Woodman Reconsidered

Abstract

The impetus for this round table came from the desire to extend an informal discussion following a screening of Elisabeth Subrin's The Fancy, an experimental film addressing the work and figure of the photographer Francesca Woodman. A student at the Rhode Island School of Design in the late 1970s, Woodman produced a strikingly mature body of work before committing suicide in 1981 at the age of twenty-two. Although during her lifetime she participated in a number of exhibitions in alternative spaces in New York and Rome, Woodman's first significant public exposure came posthumously, through a 1986 exhibition coorganized by the Wellesley College Museum and the Hunter College Art Gallery. An accompanying catalogue featured essays by Rosalind Krauss and Abigail Solomon-Godeau. These texts, particularly the latter, which situated Woodman's work in relation to the postmodern feminist practice of artists such as Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger, played a determinate role in her initial art-historical reception. Indeed, it was through this lens that I first encountered her photographs in the early 1990s, and it was, in part, my sense of the limitations of Solomon-Godeau's analysis of Woodman's art as a strategic appropriation and subversion of stereotypes of femininity that motivated my own writing on Woodman.