Overview & Events

Gallery Talk: Prima Vista
Saturday, June 27, 2:00–3:00 p.m.

In Prima Vista—an Italian phrase meaning “at first sight”—artist and master printmaker Susan Goldman turns away from the visible world and toward inner vision. These works do not depict recognizable places or scenes; instead, like a flower dissolving into a horizon, images arise from an initial moment of awareness, before thought takes hold.

Working with large-scale prints on aluminum, she embraces translucency, layering, and reflection to create compositions with luminous color, fluid movement, and intuitive mark-making. Goldman gives form to what is glimpsed and inwardly felt before it is understood. In Prima Vista, seeing is not about recording what is there, but about honoring what appears within the mind’s eye—immediate, alive, and unbound by representation.
Though her approach is intuitive, it is deeply informed by decades of experience. Shapes and colors emerge through a process of looking, revising, and responding, guided by a physical and perceptual sensitivity to color. “Threads of art history,” she says, “run through everything. Consciously and unconsciously, my habits, my instincts, and the artists I admire shape what I do. At some point, I realize I have made my own art history. I know I’m in new territory. It feels right.”

Susan Goldman is the founding director of the Printmaking Legacy Project®, a nonprofit dedicated to documenting and preserving printmaking practices. Based in Washington, DC, she has played a significant role in the region’s arts community through her teaching and collaborative work, while maintaining an active studio practice with exhibitions nationally and internationally. This is her first solo museum exhibition.