Black Poppy (Primary Title)
Judith Godwin, American, 1930 - 2021 (Artist)
It was hard for a young girl from Virginia to come to New York not knowing a soul, and try to do something that wasn’t easy for women to do. —Judith Godwin
Born in Suffolk, Virginia, Godwin attended Mary Baldwin College in Staunton before studying with Theresa Pollak at Richmond Professional Institute (RPI, now Virginia Commonwealth University). She graduated a decade after fellow Virginian Nell Blaine in 1952. Encouraged by her teachers, Godwin moved the following year to New York City, where she took classes at the Art Students League and later studied with Hans Hofmann. Her dynamic compositions epitomize the “action painting” of the 1950s. As she has explained, “I’m not thinking; I’m doing it. I just have something maybe in the back of my mind, and usually they are, sort of, not explosive things, but movements.”
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