Three artists. One name. One logo.
Most artist foundations serve a single artist. The Woodman Family Foundation serves three, and they lived in the same house. Betty Woodman worked in clay for almost seventy years, and in 2006 became the first living woman artist to get a solo show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her husband George spent six decades on pattern and color, first in tessellated paintings of interlocking geometric shapes, later in black-and-white photography, and his work sits in the collections of MoMA, the Guggenheim, and the Whitney. Their daughter Francesca, who died by suicide at twenty-two, made her entire body of work in about eight years, and in 2012 the Guggenheim gave her the first comprehensive survey of her work in North America.
Betty and George set the foundation up late in their lives, and Patterson Sims, a board member who knew our work with artists' foundations from the Saul Steinberg and Leon Polk Smith foundations, brought us in to give it an identity. The brief: three different mediums, three separate reputations, one family name. Whatever we made had to read as a single thing while still giving each artist a place of their own. Francesca was the best known of the family, her fame tangled up with the story of her death, and the foundation didn't want her celebrity crowding out her parents. Her photographs shaped how a generation of artists thought about the body, space, and the camera.
The window
We started by immersing ourselves in the work and sketching a lot. The obvious direction was threes, and we tried plenty of them: three similar shapes, three complementary forms, even the three circles that happen to sit inside the word "Woodman." Some of these were clever, which turned out to be the trouble with them. Any three shapes can stand in for any three of anything. None of it belonged to this family in particular.
We found what we needed in an unusual place: not the artwork, but the windows of the rooms where it was made. The Woodmans lived and worked in spaces they made their own, from the Boulder studios where Betty and George both taught for decades, to the farmhouse in Antella outside Florence, to the Chelsea loft they bought in 1980. Being a painter, George didn't leave the windows alone. He painted the frames of all of his studios, in Colorado, New York City, and Tuscany, the same shade of sky blue. At the Chelsea loft, Betty's windows wore a lively yellow. Francesca had a color of her own: the deep blue of the diazotype process used for architectural blueprints, which she adopted in 1980 because it let a young artist with no money work at monumental scale.
So the logo became a window: a simple frame around the wordmark, in three colors. George's sky blue, Betty's yellow, Francesca's diazotype blue. Together they read as one family under one name, and apart, each artist keeps a color of their own. By the time we drew it, the palette question had already answered itself, because each Woodman had picked a color years before we showed up.
A frame built to grow
Those three colors run through everything that followed, from stationery to exhibition materials to a website with a hard job: presenting three prolific bodies of work without burying the visitor. Each artist's section carries their color, so you always know whose world you're in, while the shared architecture keeps the family together on one stage. Betty liked to describe her own work as "setting the stage" for a performance, and we kept that in mind. This stage needed room for three.
From the archive
We also built for the long haul. The site launched with a curated sampling, but the archive behind it runs to thousands of works across three artists, three mediums, and sixty years, all of it needing to stay browsable as it grows. The platform was engineered to take that in over time. It also gives the foundation one more window, this one for news, publications, and a busy exhibition calendar.
The results
The Woodmans' reputation has kept climbing since launch, and the foundation's exhibitions have grown bigger and more frequent. Recent seasons brought Francesca to the National Portrait Gallery in London, paired with Julia Margaret Cameron, and put Betty and George together in a two-person show at Charleston in East Sussex. Through all of it, the identity hasn't needed to change.
Betty and George built this foundation themselves, while they were alive to shape it, one last shared project from two people who spent their lives making things side by side. The identity works the way their houses did. One structure, three colors, everybody at their own window.
Condensed has been extremely attentive and creative. They understand our needs, and are sympathetic to our artists and our mission... We’ve also moved up significantly in terms of search results; all three of our artists have had better search ranking. The team has been fantastic in their aesthetic designs, and they’ve given us plenty of interesting design options. On top of that, they listen to our feedback; whenever we want to do something unexpected, they’re excited to do it with us.
Lissa McClure – Executive Director at Woodman Family Foundation
