OCMA | Orange County Museum of Art

Jack Goldstein was born in 1945 in Montreal, Canada, and moved to Los Angeles as a teenager in the 1960s. He attended Chouinard Art Institute from 1966?1969, and was one of the first graduates at the California Arts Institute where he received his MFA in 1972?while working under John Baldessari. Intrigued by the visual systems of mass culture, he went on to experiment with performance, film, sound pieces, sculpture, and paintings that explored the spectacle and conventions of the entertainment industry. He moved to New York in the early 1970s and had his first solo show in 1980 at Metro Pictures Gallery.
By 1972 he began to spend increasing periods of time in New York; where he became associated with a group of artists whose work was included in Douglas Crimp?s seminal Pictures exhibition at Artists Space in 1977. He continued to maintain a strong relationship to Southern California throughout the 1970?s, exhibiting and making films there. As a central figure within a loosely formed group of artists that included, among others, Matt Mullican, David Salle, and James Welling, Goldstein helped define art in the 1980?s.
Goldstein's work has been the focus of many solo exhibitions at important institutions, including the Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, California (2012); Museum fur Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main, Germany (2009); The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2002); and the Centre National D'Art de Grenoble, Grenoble, France (2002); in addition to numerous group exhibitions nationally and internationally. He taught at several institutions including the Art Center College of Art and Design, Pasadena, California; School of Visual Arts, New York City; State University of New York at Buffalo; University of Hartford; and California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, California. The artist passed in 2003 in San Bernardino, California.