Chronology

1949 Born in Los Angeles, California

1952 Screenwriter father, Waldo Salt, threatened with prison as one of the “Hollywood Nineteen” by The House of UnAmerican Activities for being a communist, moved the family to New York City to find work.

1955 First began studying drawing, oil painting and composition.

1960-1963 Studied at The Art Student’s League with artists from the “NY School”, becoming adept at drawing and painting from life.

!963-1966 Studied with a Sumei master from Japan, becoming proficient in the field of Japanese ink drawing.

1963-1967 The High School of Music and Art, Harlem, NY.

1970-1972 School of Visual Arts, New York. Studied with the most innovative artists of that time; Brice Marden, Chuck Close, Jonathan Borofsky, Mel Bochner, minimalist composer Steve Reich and Marsha Tucker, who later started The New Museum in Soho, NYC.

My solid takeaway at that time was from Chuck Close. Graphite “mark making” and transferring an image via the grid was invaluable to my tendency towards realism and later large scale murals. Jonathan Borofsky was a mind exploder and introduced to me the possibility of being completely free and thinking creatively outside the box, whatever that box was in those days. And it wasn’t until much later on in my life that I was able to utilize what I saw and absorbed from a quiet unassuming Brice Marden.

1972 Marsha Tucker opened the New Museum and took an interest in my work, and was very encouraging for me at that time- being in my early twenties and entering the world and the streets of NY as an artist.

1973-1977 At this time I was enmeshed in the blooming art and photography world of Soho. My boyfriend, photographer Michael Martone and I were friends with many of the rising photographers of the time-Ralph Gibson, Mary Ellen Mark, filmmaker Larry Clark of “Tulsa” fame, critic A.D. Coleman. We shared and traded our work. It was then I learned about the elegance of art making; there was dignity in committing to honesty in our work and being good at what we did. And a fragile hold sometimes on maintaining our sanity.

1973 Exhibits at Brooklyn Museum, “Women in the Arts”, Brooklyn, NY.
1974 Exhibits at Women in the Arts Gallery, Broome St, NYC.
1975 Exhibits at Huntington Hartford Museum of Art, “Women in the Arts”, NYC.

1977 Exhibits at Mamaroneck Artist Guild, curated in affiliation with Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC.

1977 Exhibits at The Nobe Gallery, NYC, “The Seventies”, curated by David Boyce (Holly Solomon Gallery)

1977 Exhibits at Las Vegas Art Museum, “Works on Paper”, curated by Marsha Tucker (The New Museum), honorable mention.

1978 Met my Tibetan teacher in New York and began my life long study and practice of Tibetan Buddhism.

1978 Moved to Venice, California and immediately became involved in the Los Angeles mural movement, utilizing the grid “mark-making” process that I learned from Chuck Close.

1980-1991 Moved to Woodstock, New York where I a portrait studio in my home. Working in large format acrylic paintings the work evolved into a more fluid style often leaning towards the surreal. Portraits of faces that were 5 x 5 foot gestural charcoal drawings.

1982 Solo exhibition at Columbia Green College, NY.

1987 Solo Exhibition at The Night Gallery, Woodstock, NY.

1988 Solo exhibition at The Night Gallery, Woodstock, NY.

1991 Traveling throughout the southwest, living in a camper.

1992 Landed in Santa Fe, New Mexico. My surrealistic sensibility continued to evolve.
Living on the road inspired me to draw from my dreams and keep a journal. My work became more and more internalized.

1994-1999

1994 was the year that everything changed for me. I was in a serious car accident that spared me but took the life of my partner of 7 years, my dog, and my cat. It took me a year to walk and use my right hand again. The trauma from that experience catapulted me into a new territory on every level. Art was the only thing that enabled me to remain steady in mind and spirit. I drew and painted inner visions that appeared as a language. Working with tuning forks and spontaneous songs each painting appeared as a glyph of an emotion that I would attempt to heal as I painted. The series was called “Emotional Wisdom” and “The Intelligence of Matter”.
This process lasted five years and was the first step towards abstraction. It still involved me, but it was the beginning of seeing the painting itself as holding a resonance that goes beyond flat representation or “illustration”.

1996 Solo exhibition at 302 Pearl Gallery, Boulder, CO.

1998 Exhibits at Art Expo, International Print Show, Bombay, India

1999 Solo exhibition of prints at The Jesi Shah Gallery, Hydrabath and Bombay India.

2000 Exhibits at Payerbach Museum, “100 Sacred Visions”, Payerbach, Austria.

2001 I had moved out of my orange grove, looking for somewhere else to live and work, staying on a friends’ couch.
It was New Years Day. I woke up feeling the angst of no studio, no home, and genuinely wondering what my next body of work would be. I sat in the stillness of that cold January morning, closed my eyes and asked the silence what direction I was to go in. I promised I would keep a sharp eye out and really listen. If I found it I would devote myself to it for as long as necessary. I got up, took off the sheets and blanket, put the couch pillows back and walked in the kitchen to get my cup of espresso. I promptly forgot my request and went about the day. As I meandered through the house I was struck by all her beautiful rugs, throw rugs, with their beautiful patterns. Diamonds connected running down the middle of the rug like a spine.
Every day looking at those rugs with diamonds, diagonal cross-hatching and marveling, still not thinking about my request. But somewhere I took note on a deep level of the phenomenon of the net like structure of the diamond grid. It slowly began to infuse my thoughts. Weeks went by. I was now looking at chain link fences, weavings, considering the vajra net in Tibetan buddhism, or the diamond net, how it stretches out, and there is no longer a square grid but a diamond grid stretching through the infinite as a field. The field as in quantum physics. Where all things are connected, interconnected. And so I became obsessed. Which became the sin I had been looking for- I couldn’t get it out of my mind. The idea of light coming off the corners of the diamond, how that was actually what light looked like- rays streaming out at forty five degree angles. Light does not come off a square that way. So a tilted square had a correlation to light. I began to draw this. And diamond grids.

Red and white diamond grids. A charcoal called “The Descent of Light” was the first drawing of this idea. Leading ultimately to a painting called “Our Lady of the Dark”. This was an abstract many legged form swirling around a yellow diamond in the center of the painting. I taught an art class in my studio there.

From a single diamond in the middle of my last symbolic painting, Our Lady of the Dark, began a trajectory that required only the proportion of the diamond in relation to the proportion of the canvas. The diamond was always white, sitting centered on the bottom of the canvas. The field always solid matte red or black. She stripped away anything unnecessary and began to work only with varying proportions.

2002 Solo exhibition at Zanders Gallery, Ventura, CA.

2002 Exhibits at Studio 620, “Minimal States”, Santa Barbara, CA.

Within the year I left Ojai to move to Joshua Tree, CA in the Mojave desert to further develop this idea and attempt to open an artists retreat center with friends. It was already an existing 18 acre buddhist retreat called Dhama Dhena, run by the elder “crazy wisdom” teacher Ruth Dennison. She wanted to “roll it over” to us for a dollar as it was a non profit.
It didn’t come to pass- we were prophetically living in the Dukka House (suffering house) and I never really found the right studio space to work in, but it was the extreme wind that ultimately blew me in the direction of Los Angeles. My birth home. To finally live and paint where I remain today.

2003 Moved to Los Angeles, California.

My first job was restoring murals. Murals on the freeway, and historical Mexican murals. I worked with Nathan Zakheim, the main guy in this field and we worked out of the Howard Hughes Airport hangar.

I also worked as an art assistant to the painter Mary Corse. We had been friends since 1970 when I shared her studio with her for a short time and we have remained friends and colleagues since then. We have shared many of the same ideas and approaches to life and she has been great source of inspiration to me.
I learned many of my studio skills from her. And working with her reinforced the tenacity and consistency it takes to be a good painter and sustain over the years.

I took a studio in a garage in Mar Vista. This is where my work began to swiftly evolve out of an idea to a true materialization of meaning for me. The beginning of putting onto canvas what I always wanted to say but hadn’t found a deeper abstraction of it, the experience of what I call “abstract mind”. I found that mathematics and proportions were for me the most direct line to expression of feeling. I was not interested in expressing me, but rather wanted to let the painting say it, to be for and about the painting. I wanted the most of what I knew to be said in as little a way as possible.
Through all my years of studying with my Tibetan teachers I gained some crucial points that had to be made in the art itself. In other words, what I learned of the truth of reality applied to art as well. When observing something that appears to be outside ourself, try not to find a reference to it, merely it is what it is. This takes us out of the habit of making a story out of it that’s good or bad, right or wrong, up or down. It simply is and there is no reference to something else. This keeps us from a dualistic way of seeing things, black and white. Our teachers warn us of the pitfalls of this so we can remain in a more balanced place of equilibrium. The other is to be able to look at my painting and “not see how it looks, but how it is”. (John Mclaughlin). This keeps me internalized and out of judgemental thought. The more simple and direct the painting the less I am involved in whether it is pretty or not, but only guided by the subtle nuances of proportional changes. This is also why I kept it to red or black and white. although, honestly, like the diamond obsession, I became obsessed with red and white. The feeling of it, the way it was the only two colors that worked in total harmony together. A true mystery to me. Red and white. In Tibetan teachings red is female and white is male. Red blood, white semen. I also became involved in the mathematics of proportion and how one can have a small scale proportion and then blow it up to larger scale, same proportion. The fascination with this is that you can have the same proportion and no matter how large, the universe, or how small the part, the universe or the whole is always contained in the part. This is quantum physics. The Tibetans (who’s findings over the millennia have always been proven to be true in physics) teach that the whole of the infinite universe is is contained in our body. So I painted this for the next five or six years until it evolved by necessity to the next phase of work.

2005 Solo exhibition and talk at T House Gallery, “Abstract Mind”, Santa Barbara, California.

2006 Turning point in my work. Painted a 9×8 foot canvas with a white rectangle, instead of a diamond, on the center bottom jutting up at a forty-five degree angle. I started to question the necessity of painting the rectangle on the canvas to experience and feel proportion. I decided to have the canvas itself be the rectangle on the wall sitting on the floor, jutting up the wall at a forty-five degree angle. She painted the front white (as was always the diamond or the rectangle) and surrounded the painting on the sides with several layers of matte black paint at first. When you stood in front of theses canvases you couldn’t always tell where the canvas ended and the wall began-both being white. But as you began to move over and around you began to see the red or black line from the side containing the form of the canvas, a boundary. They started out as awkward shapes ranging in size, always sitting on the floor and jutting up the wall to the right at a forty-five degree angle to the floor. They ranged from 120×40 inches, 108×36 inches, to 72×60 inches. Always matte white on the front, with a few layers of monochromatic matte color on the sides. In the beginning I had no thought about the lines being more pronounced in the front or the halo of color on the wall. There was only indoor lighting and no daylight.

2006 Exhibition at Gallery C, “”L.A. Minimalism Today”, Hermosa Beach, CA.

2009 Solo exhibition at Juliet McIver Fine Arts, “New Paintings” , Los Angeles, CA.

2010 Moved into studio in Inglewood with large windows and a lot of light. I began to notice that the color on the side of the painting glowed on the wall. Now the paintings were lit up by the natural light. This began to incorporate into her work purposefully. Now the canvas was interacting with the environment, the wall, the air was infused with hues of color.
Paintings still standing on the floor, white paint on the front, with one color surrounding it on the sides, Salt began to tilt the painting to the right so that the left upper corner was vertical to the lower right corner that sat on the floor. She decided to stop at that angle for each painting because it always made a vertical to the floor inside the painting.
As most paintings hang vertically or horizontally to the floor in relationship to the surrounding architecture, Salt wanted to allude to that idea rather than be literal. Salt was also pushing the boundaries of what a painting can be, how far could she go before there was a lack of balance or presence.

2011 Solo exhibition at Juliet McIver Fine Arts, Bergamot Station, Los Angeles, CA.

2013 Exhibits at Nye + Brown Gallery, “Voluminosity”, Los Angeles, CA.

2015 Paintings became as narrow as I could conceive them: 6 inches wide, ranging from 10 feet to five feet tall. Still sitting on the floor (except for the five foot canvases), tilted to the right, with upper left corner vertical to the lower right corner. I also varied the depth of the canvases from 2 inches, 2.5 inches, 3 inches and 4 inches.
I began to experiment with hanging the paintings close together, by about six inches to “mix” the colors on the wall between.
This also changed the color of the sides of each painting. Flux.

2015 LA ART SHOW, Ace Gallery Booth, Los Angeles, CA

2016 Featured as a “Future Great” in ArtReview magazine, nominated/written by artist, Mary Corse, Los Angeles, CA.

2016 Solo exhibition at Ace Gallery, “Vertical”, Los Angeles, CA

2016 “Must see” in BlouinArtInfo, November 8, by Isabella Mason, solo exhibition “Vertical”, Ace Gallery,

2017 Awarded the Lillian Orlofsky William Freed Foundation Grant, Provincetown, Mass.

2018 Moved into studio in West Adams, LA.

2019 Began off the wall series, stretching canvas over a shaped canvas: the shape of a wedge coming off the wall..so that what would normally be the front of a painting hanging on the wall, now becomes the two sides of the canvas, jutting away the wall in the form of a wedge. Walking around, the line around the canvas changes, seen from the front it is a line.
The first one was 9 ft x 3 ft, Thick Black Line.

2019-2022 Covid pandemic. Lock down. Experimented with oil paint, oil sticks, glossy, more gestural surfaces along the sides of the canvases. Glossy more gestural white on the front.

2022 Aesthetica Art Prize Exhibition, York Art Gallery, London, England,

2022 Untitled Miami, Alfa Gallery,Miami, FL2023 FLOW, Alfa Gallery, Miami, FL
2023 Abstraction in Action, Alfa Gallery, Miami, FL
2024 SEE, Alfa Gallery, Miami, FL
2025 The Power of Alchemy, Alfa Gallery, Miami, FL
2025 retro-introspective, Project Space, Los Angeles, CA