Amy Goldin

Amy Goldin published art criticism from 1964 until 1978.

Her writing appeared regularly in Arts,  Artnews,  Artforum,  Art Journal,  New American Review, International Journal for Aesthetics and Art Criticism, and most frequently in Art in America where she was a contributing editor.

In thirteen years, she published nearly 200 pieces, ranging from single paragraph reviews of current exhibitions to catalog essays, book reviews and her specialty, challenging and thorough think pieces. Her subjects were off the radar for most mainstream critics of her time: Folk art, African American art, craft, decoration, graffiti and Islamic Art, bringing to each a rigorous approach dependent on hard looking and analytical thinking.

Amy Genevieve Mendelson was born in Detroit on February 20, 1926. Her parents, Harry and Jeanette Mendelson, immigrated from Russia shortly before her birth.   Following studies at Wayne State University, Detroit (1943-1945), and the University of Chicago (1945-1947), Amy moved to New York in 1948 and set up a painting studio on East 56th Street.  She became a student at the Art Students’ League  in 1948-1949, attended  Black Mountain College near Asheville, North Carolina in the Summer and then studied with  Hans Hofmann in New York from 1950-1952.

One of the few dated examples of her work was a 1960 cover and series of drawings for Trobar, an independent poetry journal.[1] In 1965, an exhibition of her hard edge paintings was mounted at Brata Gallery, an artists’ cooperative gallery located on 10th Street.[2]  This exhibition received a cursory review in Arts Magazine in the very same issue that Amy Goldin first started publishing her reviews of other artists’ exhibitions.[3]

[1] Trobar, A Magazine of the New Poetry, edited by George Economou, Joan Kelly and Robert Kelly, 1960, Orion Press, Brooklyn, New York.
[2] Tenth Street Galleries
[3] Jacqueline Barite, Amy Mendelson, Arts Magazine, Sept.-Oct. 1965, p. 76.

In 1972, Goldin received a National Endowment Critic’s Grant.  She commuted to Harvard to take courses from noted Islamicist, Oleg Grabar.  Here she found an intellectual basis and a world of information on an art form for which the term decoration is in no way a pejorative.

In the spring of 1974, Professor Grabar helped her to prepare an itinerary for a ten week journey through Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan, providing her with a letter of introduction from Harvard University which, with a well placed gold seal and red ribbon, opened many doors. Robert Kushner was her travel companion. Together they traveled off the beaten path, experiencing  directly the culture, monuments, historical mosques and public buildings. Her candid journals of this trip are in the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian.  Following that trip, many of Amy Goldin’s strongest essays showed a  new perspective and urgency.

Amy writes:

“Seeing what Islamic artists have produced, I became convinced that there is, in what we call decoration, an artistic alternative to art . . . that latches onto the world in a radically different way.  Decoration involves the maker in a relationship to the world around him that is much more intimate and practical than the specialized, alienated world of professional art.  Decoration doesn’t lead itself to artistic ego trips or to scientific abstract thought. Instead of seeing yourself as the unacknowledged legislator of the world, you face the requirements of our own environment. The setting of our own life and the feelings of people around you.  Your job is to clarify and heighten the impact of objects and occasions that already exist, that already nave meaning. And that  function requires quite different kinds of attention and sensitivity than you usually find among artists.”[1]

[1] Unpublished notes, Amy Goldin archive. Reel 1403, Smithsonian Archives of American Art.