Betty Woodman

Betty Woodman spent decades pushing pottery out of the category of craft and into contemporary art, treating vases and pitchers as sculptural, painterly forms rather than purely functional objects. In 2006 the Metropolitan Museum of Art gave her a retrospective, the first the museum had ever given a living female ceramicist, and her work — drawing on Italian maiolica, Greek and Japanese ceramics, and Roman pottery — now sits in the permanent collections of MoMA, the Whitney, and the Smithsonian.