For Pam Glick, returning to New York was a personal odyssey. The artist, who just opened her first show with Nicola Vassell Gallery in Chelsea, lived in the city as a young painter from 1980 and 1995. Then she left, shortly after having the first of her two sons. It was meant to be temporary. Instead, it took her nearly 30 years to return.
“We didn’t [mean to] move to Vermont—I thought we were going to go back and forth because my husband’s family lived there,” Glick tells CULTURED. “It turned out to be a much longer, Odysseus situation!”
In the decades that followed, Glick, now 70, raised her sons, divorced her husband, moved back to her native Buffalo, survived cancer, and buried her mother and brother—all with an eye toward making her way back to New York. It wasn’t just about the vibrancy of the city’s art scene, but the way the place made Glick feel. The hustle and bustle seemed to lend her an anonymity and invisibility that let her focus on her work with a single-minded intensity: “I just felt so at home and relaxed.”
Glick’s new exhibition features undeniably joyful work made since returning to the city full time two years ago. The bold canvases are filled with a sense of motion and athleticism created by a web of horizontal and vertical mark-making along an underlying grid with isolated stacks of color.
Some of these paintings incorporate small insets featuring arched bands of colorful stripes. (Glick didn’t intend for them to look like rainbows, but they do.) The contrast is dramatic with her solid backgrounds, which are often dark shades of blue or black. “I am a colorist, but I hadn’t really thought about color in a few years because I was obsessed with formalizing my marks,” Glick says.
Glick found her identity as an artist growing up in Buffalo. “I went to a girls’ school, and I was always getting sent to the principal’s office,” Glick recalls. One day, the art teacher invited her to use the school’s ceramics facilities. Art became a much-needed creative outlet.
Still, she had little experience with painting or drawing when she enrolled in the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence. Her professors sensed a raw talent that might be best left undisturbed—something Glick didn’t understand at the time. When a teacher suggested she might be better off leaving, she called her mom, terrified she was getting kicked out of school.
“I didn’t know about Outsider art. The word ‘primitive,’ I thought it was an insult,” Glick says. “Of course, 50 years later, oh God, if I could get that back—that’s the whole thing!” She completed her degree, but has spent years trying to tap back into the unrestrained energy of her earliest work.
At graduation, Glick won RISD’s Florence Leif Award, which gave her the option to pursue an MFA at Yale, or take a cash prize of about $1,500. Glick chose the money.
Today, Glick sees her paintings as the formalization of a visual language she has been developing since childhood. During those visits to the principal’s office, she remembers being given paper to draw on as a way to calm down.
“I wish I had those notebooks, because I think they would look like what I’m doing now, honestly. I know there was some amount of scribbling, mixed with penmanship, with lined paper,” Glick says. “These are my doodles, what I’ve been doing forever, unconsciously.”
Glick paints her canvases on the floor. To reach the center of the largest works, which are six feet square, she devised a wheeled “skateboard” that can roll over the canvas. She lies on her stomach, cushioned by a bright red pillow, as she paints the surface below. Glick lets the white paint drip freely as she makes row upon row of different overlapping markings, some sharp and pointy, others rounded or smooth. “I can’t explain why, but when I get to one particular area, it tells me what shape to use,” she says.
The artist finds color captivating. Her sons were both competitive skiers as children, and she would amuse herself by staring at the white slopes looking for a pop of color. “The color would become almost psychedelically bright,” Glick said. “I do it everywhere now.”
After RISD, Glick moved to New York and got an apartment and a studio in the East Village. She began visiting galleries with slides of her work, as one did in those days. “A few days later, this limousine pulls up, and Holly Solomon is in my studio, and she’s wearing this fur coat and saying ‘Oh, fabulous,’” Glick says. The legendary SoHo art dealer introduced Glick to her son, Thomas Solomon, who was then the director of White Columns. She had her first New York solo exhibition there in 1982.
Decades later, in a full-circle moment, Glick would return to the alternative art space for her first New York solo show in 23 years. “There’s some really beautiful, poetic connections with my painting career,” she admitted. Matthew Higgs, the current White Columns director, discovered Glick on social media after her sons encouraged her to start an Instagram account. The artist was in treatment for lymphoma at the time, but agreed to a solo show in 2016, effectively reintroducing her to the New York art world. (Glick is now cancer-free.)
The biggest step toward a full return came in 2022, when Higgs introduced her to London dealer Stephen Friedman. Suddenly, Glick had to scramble to set up a studio visit in the city. Luckily, a friend had a space in an old carpet cleaning factory in Harlem available, and Glick was able to hire an art handler to drive everything down from Buffalo just in the nick of time.
Showing with Friedman—who closed his gallery dramatically in February due to insolvency—was life-changing for Glick, who still gets emotional talking about that fateful studio visit. The gallery dedicated booths to her work at two New York fairs in 2023, followed by solo shows in London and New York. With the sales from these outings, Glick was suddenly able to afford a modest one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan—and secure a studio just a few train stops away. (She is also represented by Belgium’s Maruani Mercier gallery.)
The artist, who has always struggled with multitasking, is now single-minded in her commitment to New York and its boundless creative energies. “I found that working, teaching, raising kids, showing in galleries… I couldn’t do all those things,” Glick admits. “I had to drop something, and I dropped the career part. I continued to paint and make things, but there was a solid 10 or 15 years where I didn’t even think about having a show.”
Today, Glick’s sons are both adults—one a stand-up comic, the other an associate at a New York law firm. And she has no regrets about the winding path her career has taken.
“Being a mother was so supremely creative—you’re always making puppets or building a tree house, or just thinking of stuff that’s fun to do,” the artist says.
Glick had enjoyed success during her first stint in New York. She was even one half of an art world power couple; her ex-husband, the artist Johnny Swing, is known for his unique coin furniture. Three decades later, her adult children at her side, this latest chapter is even sweeter.
“Pam Glick: PG-13” is on view at Nicola Vassell, New York, through Dec. 17.
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