Among the foremost contemporary American ceramists, Betty Woodman has been inventing and re-inventing new and traditional forms, producing exuberant, brightly colored, and witty works since the early 1950s. During the Pattern and Decoration movement in the ’70s, her career gained the momentum it has had ever since. This was the year she invented one of her most acclaimed works, the Pillow Pitcher, in which she crafted a vessel out of a bulbous shape pinched at both ends like a pillow. She also produces painterly wall pieces and large-scale installations, platters, and, most enduringly, vases in an endless array of styles, ranging from human figures to eccentrically concocted, multi-sided Cubist abstractions. The artistic traditions of Italy and the Mediterranean region inform Woodman’s work, which is also marked by Chinese and Modernist influences, and the ebullience of her unbounded approach.