Carol Brown Goldberg (born 1940) is an American artist working in a variety of media.[1][2] While primarily a painter creating heavily detailed work as large as 10 feet by 10 feet, she is also known for sculpture, film, and drawing. Her work has ranged from narrative genre paintings to multi-layered abstractions to realistic portraits to intricate gardens and jungles.
Of the latter work, in 2018 Dr. Robert S. Mattison wrote, "Over the past two years, Carol Brown Goldberg has created an extraordinary body of new work: the series Entanglement. On the one hand, these complex and stunningly beautiful paintings and drawings embody Goldberg's profound meditations on the creative process and the origins of art-making. On the other, they personify the artist's intuitive feeling for the biological world, as well as her continuing investigations of the advanced sciences of our age. These large paintings and smaller drawings propose a procreative and fecund connectedness between nature's forces and artistic activity." Mattison is the Marshall R. Metzgar Professor of Art History at Lafayette College.[3]
Carol Brown Goldberg is represented by Addison/Ripley Fine Art in Washington, D.C.,[4] and by C. Grimaldis Gallery in Baltimore, MD.[5]
Early life and education
Carol Brown Goldberg was born in Baltimore, Maryland. She received a B.A. in American Studies from the University of Maryland, then moved to Washington, D.C., and further
Her first group exhibition was at the Washington Project for the Arts (WPA) Options Exhibition for Emerging Artists.[6] This was soon followed by her first solo exhibition at the Osuna Gallery. CBG remained with Ramon Osuna until his passing in 2019.
Career
Carol Brown Goldberg's work has been described as "intricate works of science and nature, windows into imagined cosmos, explosions of symbols and letters, and wobbly story book scenes,"[7] as well as "a carnival of color, form and motion, with each painting revealing different elements depending on where in the room you stand to view it."[8]
Writes Jack Rasmussen, director and curator of the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center in Washington, D.C., "Carol is deeply and tirelessly engaged in the pursuit of her muse. She is busy painting, sculpting, drawing, printing, photographing, filming, videotaping, and writing. Her art spans the legacy of the Washington Color School and the figurative tradition of American University, where she taught for many years. She has the hand of a Victorian engraver, the wit and pathos of Dada, and the physical gesture of Post-Impressionists and Abstract Expressionists. Throw in some Pop and Op and you still have not satisfactorily described her gifts or her influences, for she is as influenced by physicists, astronomers, neuroscientists, neurobiologists as she is by artists or movements."[9]
In 2018, Carol Brown Goldberg was honored by Moment Magazine as "visionary artist" alongside Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Jane Mayer as part of the Year of the Woman.
She has taught at American University and University of Maryland, was Artist in Residence at Chautauqua Institute, and is a recipient of the Maryland State Arts Award.
She has served on the board of The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., and on the Collector's Committee of the Reading Public Museum.
Exhibitions
Carol Brown Goldberg's work has been the subject of multiple solo and group exhibitions at museums and galleries in the United States as well as in Paris, Berlin, Moscow, Monterrey, Mexico and Mexico City.
In Washington, D.C., CBG's solo exhibits span from The Phillips Collection (where she was paired with Henri Matisse),[8] to Addison/Ripley Fine Art and the Washington County Museum of Fine Art. Other solo exhibits include The Frost Art Museum in Miami, Florida, C. Grimaldis Gallery in Baltimore, MD, and on Martha's Vineyard, MA, at the Martha's Vineyard Playhouse, Chilmark Public Library, and Featherstone Center for the Arts.
From 2014 to 2016 her paintings and sculpture were on tour, appearing in the Vero Beach Museum of Art, Vero Beach, Florida, the Foosaner Art Museum in Melbourne, Florida, the South Dakota Art Museum in Brookings, South Dakota, and the Lake Charles Cultural Center in Lake Charles, Louisiana. In 2021 she was chosen to be one of 12 Mid-Atlantic women abstract artists in the exhibition Fields and Formations, organized by Kristen Hileman.[10]
In addition to the museums and institutions holding her work (listed below), CBG's sculptures are part of permanent outdoor exhibits at Reading Public Museum in Reading, Pennsylvania; Johns Hopkins University Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland; The Chautauqua Institute in Chautauqua, New York; Montclair State University in Montclair, New Jersey; in DC at American University; George Washington University, the Kreeger Museum, and Martha's Table; and in Spain at the Medina del Campo Sculpture Park.
Projects
Special projects include a work celebrating the Black Student Fund's 25th anniversary in 1989, The Poetry of Justice for Amnesty International's Human Rights Day in 1990, and in 1996, Solar Night for the Bosnian Human Rights Group of Oxford, England to encourage women's entrepreneurship in Bosnia.
Additional notable projects include the 38-foot photographic mural on permanent display at the Katzen Arts Center at American University; Washington, D.C., in 2016, called "The Studio: A Place of Transformation, and a 22 × 6–foot wall mural in collaboration with students, faculty, and staff at Florida International University in 2017.[11]
CBG produced two movies exploring the relationship between art and memory, the 1993 film, Concertina,[12] which received the AMANA Award, and the 2013 eleven-minute film, The Color of Time.[13]See below for recognition.
Connecting Art and Science
In the late 1980s, CBG began examining the relationships between art and science, leading to a 14-part lecture series, "Voices of Our Time," CBG produced and curated in 1990 and 1991 at the Strathmore Hall Arts Center in Bethesda, Maryland.[14] Expanding on this relationship, her work has been exhibited at the American Center for Physics, and other science related institutions. Science is often reflected in her work and are included in her lectures and talks.
In 2012, she and neuroscientist Dr. Partha Mitra, participated in Fré Ilgen's panel discussion, Checkpoint Ilgen #9, in Berlin, Germany, focused on creativity and the brain.[15]
This focus continues to illuminate CBG's work, as art critic and poet Donald Kuspit writes in an International Arts and Artists' volume on the artist. "Goldberg's new abstract paintings are scientifically grounded, indicating that spiritual consciousness is not a groping toward the unknown—blindly mystical as it were—but enlightened cognition of scientifically known reality. If science is mysticism satisfied—what seems beyond comprehension made comprehensible—then Goldberg's abstract paintings show that the seemingly mystical, incomprehensible implicate order is scientifically comprehensible."[16]
Awards and honors
2020 "Distinguished Terrapin Award," The University of Maryland College of Arts and Humanities; College Park, Maryland
2019 "Transformer 16th Annual Silent Auction," Corcoran School of Art and Design; Washington, D.C.
^Goldberg, Carol Brown (2014). Carol Brown Goldberg : recent works. Chris Sheppard, International Arts & Artists, Foosaner Art Museum, Vero Beach Museum of Art, South Dakota Museum of Art, American University. Museum. [Washington, D.C.?]. ISBN978-0-9883497-2-8. OCLC922895079.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)