Lynne Golob Gelfman (1944-2020) was an American painter whose layered
abstractions were shaped by the landscapes and cultural environments of New
York, Miami, and Colombia. Born in New York, Gelfman received a BA from
Sarah Lawrence College in 1966 and an MFA from the School of the Arts at
Columbia University in 1968. She taught art at the Dalton School in New York
from 1968 to 1972, before relocating with her husband to Colombia, where they
established a flower farm outside Bogotá and later settled in Miami. While
rooted in the legacy of late modernist abstraction, her work frequently
incorporated references to architecture, indigenous textiles, and the tropical light
and atmosphere of South Florida and Latin America, resulting in surfaces that
feel both constructed and weathered.
Over the course of her career, Gelfman presented more than forty solo
exhibitions and exhibited widely throughout the United States and
internationally. Her work has been featured in exhibitions including Grids at
Pérez Art Museum Miami and Scapes at the Patricia and Phillip Frost Art
Museum at Florida International University. Gelfman's paintings are held in major
public collections including Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), the Institute of
Contemporary Art Miami (ICA), the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami
(MOCA), the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Norton Museum of Art, the
Baltimore Museum of Art, the Detroit Institute of Arts, and the Institute of
Contemporary Art, Miami. In addition to her studio practice, she was an
influential educator, teaching at Florida International University, the University of
Miami, Miami Dade College, and the Metropolitan Museum and Art Center.