Coral Woodbury

Coral Woodbury's art is a vehicle for human empathy and a way of addressing social ills. It gives voice to the voiceless and makes visible those unseen. This lifelong commitment to the catalytic force of art has informed her work even beyond the studio - in museums, education, and the addiction recovery and homeless populations. With Revised Edition, Woodbury creates a material intervention in the inherited Western, white, hetero- and androcentric canon. Her chosen ground is Janson's History of Art, the definitive art history tome of the 20th century - which entirely omitted women from its first 29 printings. Coral inks portraits of artist women over pages torn from this myopic volume, making visible artists who have been overlooked and undervalued. When every page is redrawn, the massive project will encompass 617 paintings, and stand as testimony against the consequences of erasure that reach deeply into our culture. Across all her bodies of work, she explores the power of art to reveal the invisible, express the ineffable, and hold the ephemeral.

Coral Woodbury (b. 1971) critically reinterprets Western artistic heritage from a feminist perspective. She has participated in numerous residencies, including in Italy with rosenclaire, with whom she has worked for 30 years. In 2020 she was a finalist for the international Mother Art Prize, culminating in the Procreate Project exhibition at Cromwell Place in London. Last year, in addition to solo shows in Boston and London, she participated in the exhibition Call and Response at Newport Art Museum, Rhode Island. In 2018 she took part in the Humanities Approaches to the Opioid Crisis, Boston University; the International Travelling Art exhibition at Taragaon Museum in Kathmandu; and #00Bienal de la Habana in Cuba. The same year her work traveled to Palazzo Reale, Genova and Duino Castle, Trieste, Italy. She has given talks with Michelle Millar Fisher (Curator of Contemporary Decorative Arts, MFA Boston), Dr. Claudia Tobin (for The Royal Drawing Academy, London) and, most recently, with renowned scholar Griselda Pollock for the University of Cambridge, New Hall Art Collection.

Woodbury is represented by Abigail Ogilvy Gallery (Boston, MA) and HackelBury Fine Arts (London).