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In Memoriam: Lynne Golob Gelfman

In Memoriam: Lynne Golob Gelfman

It is with great sadness that we learned that Lynne Golob Gelfman died on January 20, 2020. Her family said, “It comforts us to know that she painted until the day before her death, and she passed away peacefully. She filled our hearts and lives with joy, spontaneity and generosity.”

ArtSpeak published the video interview below with Gelfman in 2016.

 

INTRODUCTION: 1:53 min.




Introduction to Lynne Golob Gelfman. 1:53 min.  Interview:  Raymond Elman.  Videography:  Manuel Perez Trujillo. Music: Orlando Jacinto Garcia, Music for Berlin.  Recorded:  2/17/2016, LGG studio, Coral Gables.

 

Lynne Golob Gelfman (b. 1944) grew up in New York. She graduated from Sarah Lawrence College and then earned an MFA at the School of the Arts, Columbia University. She taught art at the Dalton School in New York from 1968 until 1972, the year that she and her husband started a flower farm outside Bogotá, Colombia, and moved to Miami — an import gateway city for flowers — where she still lives today. For Gelfman, who had loved Bogotá as an American Field Service student in 1961, the culture and landscape of Colombia, as well as the diverse, subtropical world of Miami are important influences, along with her strong ties to New York.

Gelfman gained a reputation for her distinctive process-based paintings that explore the interplay between structure and randomness, discipline and freedom, control and chance. This concern, a foundation of her career, was the basis of Gelfman’s “thru” series, begun in the 1970s, in which she painted on the back of raw, unprimed canvas, allowing acrylic color to bleed into a grid of triangles. The paintings allowed for the workings of chance within an underlying geometry and possessed a soft, diffuse luminosity of organic color.

In “sometimes random,” Gelfman further investigates these central concerns. In some paintings, the clarity of the grid becomes muted by an all over color field. In others, the triangular patterns are fractured and almost disappear. In all the paintings, the structure of the support stretcher bars quietly emerge, and the patterning may evoke associations with the handwoven textiles of Africa, South America and Japan. Gelfman’s play with color and materiality engages the fundamental issues of abstraction in ways that are uniquely her own.

Her work is in many public and private collections as well as in the permanent collections of museums, including the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami (MOCA), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Norton Museum, Baltimore Museum of Art and Detroit Institute of Arts. Gelfman has taught art at FIU, University of Miami, Miami Dade College, Metropolitan Museum and Art Center, and MOCA North Miami. For the past 15 years, she has developed art projects with inner-city children at the Barnyard, Coconut Grove.

Gelfman has had more than 40 solo shows. Her first solo show was a prize awarded by Miami’s Metropolitan Museum and Art Center in 1974, then under the leadership of Arnold Lehman. Since then, Gelfman has exhibited nationally and internationally in galleries and museums. Recent solo exhibitions include “dying the grid” (2015) William Siegal Gallery, Santa Fe, “trued surface” (2014), Dimensions Variable, Miami; “scapes” (2012), The Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum, Florida International University (FIU), Miami; “sand” (2012), Alejandra von Hartz Gallery, Miami; “between” (2009), Carol Jazzar Gallery, Miami; “cloud/water/sand” (2010), Luminaire X, Miami; “react” (2006), “across” (2003), Fredric Snitzer Gallery, Miami; “resist/react” (2006), Newman Popiashvili Gallery, New York; “18 paintings” (2003), Suite 106, New York; “grids” (2018-19), Perez Art Museum Miami.

The videos below are organized by Success Factor and run between 20 seconds and 4 minutes. Click on any video. You must be connected to the Internet to view the videos.

 

SEIZES OPPORTUNITIES: 1:01 min.




What’s your earliest awareness of “fine” art?

 

INSIGHT & INSPIRATION:  0:20 sec.




What did you learn at Sarah Lawrence that helped you in your art career?

 

DEVELOP A VOICE:  1:30 min.




Describe the evolution of your life in Miami as an artist.

 

EXPOSURE TO BROAD INFLUENCES:  1:27 min.




Who are some of the people in the arts that you interacted with in Miami?

 

UNDERSTANDS THE BUSINESS OF ART:  0:28 sec.




How has the Art Basel phenomenon impacted the Miami art community?

 

CRITICAL THINKING:  4:00 min.




Describe the evolution of your art work.

 

CREATES A UNIQUE PERSONAL BRAND: 0:53 sec.




Please talk about some of your techniques.

 

EXPOSURE TO BROAD INFLUENCES: 1:13 min.




Who and what has influenced your work?

 

PERSEVERANCE FURTHERS:  1:53 min.




Describe some of the challenges you face.

 

CRITICAL THINKING:  0:54 sec.




What role should a university play in the development of artists?