Charles Goldman

Charles Goldman (born San Francisco, California, 1966) is an American conceptual artist whose work spans sculpture, installation, performance, painting and drawing. His practice involves mundane construction materials, household objects, or studio scraps that are refashioned using self-imposed systems that recontextualize experiences of public and private space and time. Writers have described Goldman's art as "deceptively minimal, mischievously abstract" work offering both "slow-burn conceptual humor" and a practical everyman’s philosophy.

Education and career Charles Goldman, RE>CRETE>FACTORY>SHOWROOM, Sculpture, performance, installation, publication, various duration and size, 2016. Goldman completed a BA in both American Studies and Studio Arts at University of California, Santa Cruz in 1990, and earned an MFA from the University of Illinois Chicago in 1996. In the decade following, he gained recognition for shows at Southern Exposure, Hallwalls, Bellevue Arts Museum, and SculptureCenter. He has also created public projects for the Socrates Sculpture Park, Toronto Sculpture Garden, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, and Art Caucasus (Tbilisi, Georgia). In 2003, the World Financial Center commissioned "Lend Me a Memory", which evoked the losses of the 9/11 attack.

Goldman is based in Brooklyn, New York and has been a professor at Parsons School of Design since 2007.

Work and reception Goldman's art in the late 1990s drew on his experience as a carpenter, making connections between the fine and construction arts, minimalism, modernist architecture and everyday life. His sculpture All of the Walls of My Parents' House (1996) was a six-foot-high, rectangular stack of plasterboard panels of varied length that reconstituted—at scale—the interior walls of his childhood tract home. San Francisco Chronicle critic Kenneth Baker described the massive work as an ostensible reworking of the 1960s stacked minimalism of Joseph Beuys, Richard Serra and Tony Cragg. Art in America critic Calvin Reid described it as "a delightful, neatly packaged Duchampian joke." The material is an open source project that can be packaged as architectural modules or dry-mix bags; it is included in the Material ConneXion libraries worldwide.

Awards and public collections Goldman was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 2011 and has received awards from Artists Space (2002) and New York Foundation for the Arts (2016). His work belongs to the public collections of the Berkeley Art Museum, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Center for Book Arts, Library of Congress, Museum of Modern Art, New York Public Library, the Whitney Museum, and private and university collections.