Abigail Goldman

Abigail Goldman is an outsider artist who works as an investigator for the Federal Public Defender. Born in San Francisco, CA, Goldman began her professional career in Las Vegas working as a newspaper reporter and then investigator for the Federal Public Defender of Nevada, where she was no stranger to episodes of violence. 

Her artistic practice centers around miniature scenes of gruesome murders in plastic and acrylic. Dubbing her works "dieoramas," Goldman's miniature sculptures are rendered in 1:87 scale-each tiny figure is well under an inch tall, making them grotesque but familiar, grim but cute. The work's diminutive size contrasts with the larger-than-life tableaus of gore and mayhem rendered within. The narratives in Goldman's scenes are fiction, but the artist is informed by her professional life, where she witnesses and researches the "escalating feedback loop of rage and violence" present in American culture. At once adorable and offensive, Goldman's die-o-ramas explore our relationship to violence-its omnipresence and resulting banality, as well as our innate attraction to the grisly and macabre. 

Goldman's miniatures have been exhibited nationally and internationally, and her work has been featured by numerous media outlets, including the LA Times, New York Times, NPR, Atlas Obscura, Juxtapoz, and Huffington Post. In March 2019, Goldman and her work were the subject of a documentary produced for Topic Magazine.