Rina Lam Goldfield

Izzy Lee is delighted to present Chatterbox, an exhibition of paintings, drawings, and an artist book by Rina Lam Goldfield. This is Goldfield’s inaugural solo show with Izzy Lee and in Los Angeles, following her participation in the group show Grammar Girls this past summer.

Goldfield takes inspiration from friendship albums, or collaborative scrapbooks that girls and women made between the 17th and 19th centuries. Her research into the form, during a fellowship at the New York Public Library, uncovered images and marginalia that suggest often overlooked histories of female friendship. The books’ compositions guide the artist’s formal concerns: contributors composed their pages additively and often incidentally, in a way that suggests collaboration, randomness, and a love of small things.

These legacies permeate Goldfield’s new paintings. For My Toddler Niece (2026) features a green tank top emblazoned with the word “NO,” stylized and clear in its refusal. The adorned word evokes scrapbook doodles, while its repetition gives the language significant heft. Word play is central to Goldfield’s “anagram” paintings, which unite marbled surfaces and abstracted, calligraphic phrases. Marbling brings an element of printmaking and chance onto the canvas, while calligraphy straddles the divide between word and image.

This embrace of duality centers Goldfield’s drawings, which abstract a series of compound words. “Chatter” and “box” appear in stretched, overlaid marks while “be” and “witch” ripple across another page. Goldfield’s new artist book offers an accumulation of such phrases, in meticulously rendered red ink across silkscreened grids.

While Goldfield’s work evokes the light, calligraphic paintings of Giorgio Griffa, the histories of concrete poetry, and the geometries of Bridget Riley, it’s inventive and unnamed young women with whom Goldfield is really in conversation. Chatterbox indeed proposes a playful dialogue, across eras and among friends, on the page and often in the margins.

Rina Lam Goldfield (b. 1987, Northampton, MA) explores language, marginalia, and women’s lives through tactile and material-driven paintings and drawings. She earned her MFA in painting from Yale University in 2023. Goldfield has been awarded research fellowships at the Beinecke Library, New Haven, CT and the New York Public Library. She has had solo shows at Essex Flowers, New York, NY and Hamden Gallery at UMass Amherst, MA and has participated in group shows including at Perrotin, New York, NY; North Loop, Williamstown, MA; Izzy Lee, Los Angeles, CA; and Nightclub Gallery, Minneapolis, MN. Goldfield has been awarded residencies at Wild Acres, Little Switzerland, NC, and the Wassaic Project, ChaNorth, and the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild (all NY). The artist lives and works between Boston and New York and teaches painting at Boston University. She is a 2026 Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist nominee.