Lenore Golub

April 18 –May 16, 2026

Lenore Golub (1931–2024) was a Brooklyn-born painter based in New York, known for her small-scale abstractions and landscapes. She came of age amidst the roiling energy of New York’s midcentury art scene, alongside the Ninth Street painters, yet she remained at a remove as a stay-at-home mother and wife. Golub’s disciplined pursuit of a cohesive body of work was unknown even to her daughters until late in her life, when one of them discovered a trove of paintings in the family home. Dozens of paintings, mostly on 9 x 12 inch canvases, revealed the development of dreamy, color-rich themes: expressionist landscapes, geometric explorations, and painterly all-over abstractions.

Golub’s artistic world unfurled in her forties, after her daughters left home. She and her husband began to travel and bought a small home on the north shore of Peconic Bay in the Hamptons. What had been occasional art classes deepened into focused study. After attaining her Bachelor’s from Hofstra University in 1975, she helped curate an exhibition on the Harlem Renaissance at the university’s gallery, where she connected with painter and educator Hale Woodruff. This moment was a hinge in her artistic development: Woodruff’s mentorship introduced her to the Spiral Group, a collective of Black American artists in New York whose widely varied practices shared a commitment to political and philosophical inquiry. Through the luminous landscapes of Richard Mayhew, the syncopated abstractions of Norman Lewis, and Emma Amos’s free interplay of color and form, Golub found permission to move fluidly between abstraction and figuration with integrity. 

Beginning in 1989, Golub became a frequent visitor to Point Reyes and Inverness, drawing inspiration from its palette, beaches, and expansive landscape. She photographed her environment constantly, an Instamax always in her pocketbook. From her converted bedroom studio in Little Neck, Queens or the 92nd Street YMCA in Manhattan, she crafted color studies with layered, feathery depth around recurring geometric curves. At the Art Barge in Amagansett, the art-teaching crucible founded by MoMA’s Education Director Victor D’Amico, Golub absorbed the Long Island Sound and transformed Fauvist vistas into moody evocations of water, hills, and air. These places sublimated through her own photographs, the likes of Frankenthaler, Mitchell, Klee, Diebenkorn, Ryder and Avery, her love of music and novels, into her petite canvases.

Her fluency across coasts produced landscapes that feel both familiar and contradictory: bright, saturated greens conjure summer on the Peconic, yet also winter at Tomales Bay; electrical pulses in darkened skies recall humid Atlantic storms, while cool-toned glimmers evoke Pacific coastal fog. Throughout, passages of thick impasto white or rippling burnt orange link the sultry storms and the calm of a distant hill at dawn with the intense cacophony of the Long Island Expressway and the Midtown Tunnel.

Across these porous, interwoven bodies of work—landscapes, geometries, and abstractions—her focus was the subtle tension between soft and hard, color and form, space and gesture. As she once wrote,  her geometries and line were a “search for perfection tempered by the intrinsic softness of the body and undulating nature of the land.” This tension was the productive crux of her decades-long inquiry.

The accumulation of Golub’s oeuvre, with distinct and intertwined bodies of work, was less a secret she consciously kept than a fulfilling, enriching throughline of her life. Married at nineteen, she rejoined the world twenty-five years later as a painter, having watched the scene around her with curiosity and incisively metabolized its ethos. She stepped into her creative life confident in her vision, not dependent on its recognition of her worth. She regularly applied for open calls and showed consistently with galleries, particularly in lower Manhattan, throughout the ’90s and early 2000s. This became the most productive and cohesive period of her artistic life. 

Now, Golub’s work is presented together for the first time in one of the landscapes that shaped her, representing a cultivated creative life with brilliance, subtlety, and pathos equally measured. Together, these paintings affirm that a rich artistic legacy can emerge quietly, persistently, and on its own terms—rooted in place, memory, and an unwavering commitment to form.