Brenda Goodman
The Sum of Its Parts
I am 82 years old and have been painting for 60 years. This is my fourth show with Sikkema Malloy Jenkins and presents my work in two distinct parts. The first room consists of work from 1973 to 2025, while the paintings in the second room are all from 2024-25.
The Race (1973) was painted a year after my mother died. I had been out of art school for 7 years, and my paintings at the time were still heavily influenced by my favorite artists: de Kooning, Dubuffet, and Guston, to name a few. But my mother’s death, when she was only 52 and myself 29, threw me into a place I had never experienced. I sought a way to express the depth of my grief while also experimenting with the communicative potential of paint. The Race was an important breakthrough in my development as an artist—it was included in my first solo show in Detroit, and a well-known poet invited me to sit in on her creative writing class after seeing it. I did, and this began an eleven-year period of creating pictorial symbols that represented me and the people in my life. My paintings became a visual diary of how I felt, from experiences of great happiness to profound loss. Jumping to 2023, the paintings of my studio came after COVID. I thought they would be lighter than my previous work, but the series only lasted for several paintings. I found my studio too neat, without enough to intrigue or challenge me.
I recently had surgery on my right hand, which had to be bandaged. I found myself sitting with my incapacitated hand in our living room, looking at a collection of treasured objects, along with some of my own works and a few made by friends, arranged around our now unused wood stove. I saw these treasures every day, year after year, but now it occurred to me to try drawing them. I started with my left hand, which I knew would be a challenge, and then made several other drawings with my right hand once the bandage and stitches were removed. Why, I thought, was I not doing what I have always done in my work—expressing my pain, loss, fear, sadness? The world around me had become so utterly awful that I reached a point where I could barely listen to the news. But instead of painting from that dark place, I instead found a certain comfort using my 9H to 12B pencils to render on paper those collected tokens of joy, friendship, and home.
The second room in this exhibit contains new paintings made just before the drawings. Even more so, I feel they possess a clarity and rightness of all that I have become as a painter at the age of 82. The works in the two rooms are connected through my use of space. If one removes all the details of the drawings, the remaining space echoes the composition of the abstract paintings. All of my work, from the time I was in art school to today, comes from my emotions, and my love of making art. All of my work, from small-scale drawings of objects to large abstract oil paintings, is grounded in my sense of form and space. These are the qualities that unite and foster a dialogue among the works in this exhibition.
Brenda Goodman
January 14, 2026