Thomas Woodruff (artist)

Thomas Woodruff (born 1957) is a New York-based artist who was born in New Rochelle, New York. He received a BFA from Cooper Union in 1979. He taught at the School of Visual Arts in New York City since 1988, and was Chair of the BFA Illustration and Cartooning Department for 20 years, stepping down as Chair Emeritus in 2021. The New York Times Style Magazine praised Woodruff for "diversifying the curriculum" during is tenure at SVA.

Early life and education
Woodruff was born in New Rochelle, New York. He received a BFA from Cooper Union in 1979 and attended the Skowhegan School.

One of Woodruff’s earliest series of works on paper, Sasquatch, was exhibited at the Drawing Center in New York, followed by the Science Fair in 1987.

Career
In 1988, he joined The School of Visual Arts, as a Thesis Workshop Director in Media Arts Department. Much of the artist's output is in series. Crying Clown, in the collection of the Honolulu Museum of Art, is from the Chromatic Aberration series. It is a sentimental self-portrait painted in the early years of the AIDS epidemic, showing Woodruff’s feelings of anger and loss. The Art Gallery of Western Australia, the Brooklyn Museum, the Greenville County Museum of Art (Greenville, South Carolina), the Honolulu Museum of Art, the New Orleans Museum of Art are among the public collections holding work by Thomas Woodruff. In 2022 he had an exhibition entitled Resurrection at the Vito Schnabel Gallery that was hailed as a "luminous show" by The Brooklyn Rail.

During the end of 1999, Woodruff created a series of paintings called All Systems Go. Large figurative paintings of rocket ships included his friends and family members in fantastical tableaus. Also included were costumed portraits of the artists Frank Moore and Duncan Hannah. Ken Johnson of The New York Times wrote, “The rockets read as metaphors of imaginative escape from terrestrial woe or as symbols of death.” Freak Parade was Woodruff’s next major series. The ambitious and dazzling parade of 34 images celebrates beauty in aberrance. They are all rendered in great detail and delicately embellished with tiny rhinestones.

In 2023, Woodruff's work ''Francis Rothbart! The Tale of a Fastidious Feral,'' published by Fantagraphics was called "the Sistine Chapel of graphic novels" by Steven Heller in an article in Print Magazine and praised as the "gorgeous" for being "Hand-lettered with lush color paintings and moody charcoal drawings" by The A.V. Club. The book was nominated for four Eisner Awards in the categories Best Graphic Album (New), Best Painter/Multimedia Artist, Best Lettering, and Best Publication Design.

The Mary Sue expressed skepticism about the nominations, claiming "Something certainly seems fishy...as his pretentious, racist, and erotic comic 'opera' that no one has ever heard of, has no widespread appeal, and hasn’t been receiving any press has suddenly scored four Eisner nominations." Francis Rothbart! was panned by former students, with complaints included racism, cultural appropriation, scenes of animal mutilation, and sexual content involving a child protagonist. These included scenes of masturbation and "eroticized child-animal encounters," such as the child suckling on various animals' teats before performing fellatio on a fox. Additionally, several students came forth with allegations of Woodruff being an emotionally abusive School of Visual Arts teacher whose methods "dissuaded many from pursuing careers in comics," citing personal interactions with Woodruff.

Woodruff initially responded in a statement provided by Fantagraphics that his "frank critiques" of his students "were intended to help them develop keen minds and strong spines," and to criticism of the book that "Artists must be brave, particularly telling the stories that they need to tell." He declined the nominations a week later.

Artwork
In several notable series of paintings, Woodruff was one of the first artists to explore the grief of the AIDS epidemic: The Spectre of the Rose (1989), based on a 17th-century alchemical technique that attempted to preserve life; Rosabelle Believe(1989), a group of paintings organized in four “movements” about permanence and impermanence; The Secret Charts (1995), a series of 26 trompe l’oeil scrolls depicting an alphabet of loss; Chromatic Aberration (1991), a group of paintings in three parts which used the “Impotent” kitsch imagery of clowns, tattoos, and greeting cards; and Apple Canon (1997), his collection of 365 individual apples “portraits” to “keep the doctor away”. These paintings were included in his 1997 touring museum-survey show, entitled Nosegays and Knuckle Sandwiches.

The Solar System (The Turning Heads) (2008) was a series of motorized paintings of the planets and sun, utilizing the trope of the “upside-down” head—an image that would change when flipped.

2022

 * Francis Rothbart!- The Tale of a Fastidious Feral, Vito Schnabel Gallery, New York, N.Y.
 * Resurrection, Vito Schnabel Gallery, New York, N.Y.

2012

 * The Four Temperaments Variations, P.P.O.W. Gallery, New York, N.Y.

2008

 * Solar System (The Turning Heads), P·P·O·W, New York, NY

2000

 * Apple Cannon, The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu, HI

1998

 * My Wild Life, Marguerite Oestreicher Fine Arts, New Orleans, LA

1991

 * Chromatic Aberration, P·P·O·W, New York, NY

1989

 * Rosabelle, Believe, P·P·O·W, New York, NY

Awards
In 1978, he was awarded Willard Cummings Memorial Prize, at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.