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 Waukegan, IL and raised 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 important solo exhibitions including Grids at Pérez Art Museum Miami (2018) and Scapes at the Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum at Florida International University (2012). 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, and the Detroit Institute of Arts. 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.