Neil Goodman

Goodman was born in 1953 in Hammond, Indiana, a steel-mill city outside of Chicago, whose industrial rust-belt landscape remains a key influence. He secured a teaching position at Indiana University Northwest (IUN) in Gary in 1979 as a founding member of the Fine Arts department. In 1991, he purchased a two-story residential loft building on Chicago's south side that served as his studio and a home for him, his wife, JoEllyn Codespoti Goodman, and their children, Maurice and Hana Goodman, Jenna Wright and Stephen Stults. Goodman emerged in the Chicago art scene with a two-person exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Center in 1980, group shows at the Illinois State Museum and Dart, Struve, Roy Boyd and Randolph Street galleries, and solo shows at Frumkin & Struve Gallery (his first in Chicago) and the Indianapolis Center alumni for Contemporary Art, among others. His later exhibitions include a mid-career surveys at the Chicago Cultural Center (1997) and Indiana State Museum (2006), a retrospective at the Museum of Outdoor Arts (2018), Since 2017, Goodman has been an Emeritus Professor of Fine Arts at IUN, after nearly four decades there teaching and serving as department chair (1998–2001, 2007–11). ==Work and reception==

Goodman's career is noted for its consistent modernist formal vocabulary, which has evolved through nuanced but significant experimentation from representation and narrative toward abstraction and minimalism; he cites Giacometti and Brâncuși as important touchstones. His work—primarily in bronze—is unified by: a visual grammar that emphasizes balance and strong lines; a workmanlike mastery of technique and craft, including casting and painstaking hand-finished surfaces; an emphasis on presentation and the relationship of sculpture to various spaces (pedestals, walls, floors, galleries, outdoors); and contrasts between industrial, architectural and geometric forms and natural-organic elements and textures. James Yood and Alan Artner, among others, note his sensitivity to bronze—its patina, luster, and malleability—which follows in the tradition of masters such as Henry Moore, Marini, Maillol and Giacometti. Formally, it defies sculptural convention, interpreting painterly strategies, such as the still life and frontal, single-plane presentation, in bronze. Noting the objects' intimacy and detailed textures, Kathryn Hixson wrote that Goodman "dismantles the hype of monumental Modernism in favor of a hand-held, more useful version." In 1997, Goodman created Passage for Chicago's McCormick Place South Pavilion, a 90' x 15' permanent wall installation that features an "alphabet" of more than 130 forms, many nautical, reflecting its lakeside locale; a triangular-shaped, stairwell wall-piece, Subject-Object (2000), resides in the Block Museum of Art in Evanston, Illinois. Outdoor public sculpture and gallery work (2000– ) After winning a competition in 2000 to create an outdoor work for the Dow Centennial Sculpture Garden in Midland, Michigan (Centennial Passage), Goodman began conceiving sculptures in terms of site-specificity and multiple vantage points, encouraging viewers to move around and look at and through sculptures to notice shifting forms, voids and relationships to architecture, space, and landscape. The series—formally unified by repetitions of line, module and motif (loops, arcs, arches, pyramids, wedges)—was inspired by disparate sources connected by inherent design structures: abstracted nature (e.g., Slither, Reach), geometry (Four Corners), industrial leftovers (Crank, Mirror), the arabesques of the Moorish Alhambra (Andalusia). Margaret Hawkins describes them as "light as paper" and airy, like music or mathematical equations, despite their heft. The series culminated in a sculpture garden at the center of the IUN campus that features ten monumental bronze outdoor sculptures interacting with a native landscape designed by Cynthia Owen-Bergland. A second, horizontal series employs shard-like, trapezoidal forms of greater mass with rectangular "windows" or openings that maximize the synergy of positive and negative spaces, and like earlier work, offer shifting perspectives on their surroundings (e.g., Twilight I and Twilight II). Margaret Hawkins and other writers describe these later outdoor works as less about substance than about their voids—"yawning, crooked windows" that frame views and allude to spiritual questions, such as the relationship between being and non-being. These taller, elongated works (e.g., Crown, 2018–21), suggested both anthropomorphic forms and topographic views of the coast when viewed frontally. ==Writing==

In his later career, Goodman has also turned to art writing, contributing reviews, essays and interviews to the New Art Examiner. His subjects have included the Confederate Mound at Chicago's Oak Woods Cemetery, artists including John Henry, Richard Hunt, Martin Puryear, Rembrandt, Richard Rezac, Peter Shelton, Adam Silverman and Kehinde Wiley, and a memorial to the late Chicago art dealer, Paul Klein. He also wrote the introductory essay for the book, Contemporary Sculptors of Chicago (2020), and an essay for the catalog Night and Day, for his commission at Valparaiso University (2020). ==Recognition and collections==

In addition to aforementioned works, Goodman has been awarded public commissions by the City of Chicago (Chicago Public Library, 1995; Martin Luther King Gateway Renovation, 1996; Geography Earth, 2002, Burnham Park Children's Garden), Greater Hartford Arts Council/Lincoln Financial (Frontier Life, 2009, Hartford, Connecticut), the Munster (Indiana) Public Art Committee (Prairie Passage, 2009, with Terry Karpowicz), and Indiana University Northwest (Tapestry, 2011). Indiana State Museum, Madden Museum of Art, Museum of Outdoor Arts, Nathan Manilow Sculpture Park (Governors State University), Racine Art Museum and Rockford Museum of Art, as well as many corporate and private collections. ==References==