Her SoHo, Manhattan gallery was initially known for nurturing the artistic movement known as Pattern and Decoration, which was a reaction to the austerities of Minimal art.
[6] Holly Solomon had been an aspiring stage actress and was enrolled at Lee Strasberg's Actors Studio shortly after moving to Manhattan.
[8] The gallery represented artists such as Judy Pfaff, Joan Mitchell, Cora Cohen, Gordon Matta-Clark, Laurie Anderson, Robert Kushner, Melissa Miller, Rob Wynne, Nam June Paik, and William Wegman, and in 1983, the gallery moved uptown to 724 Fifth Ave at 57th, but then moved again in the early 1990s back downtown to SoHo at 172 Mercer Street.
Solomon was also a proponent of the Pattern and Decoration art movement of the late 1970s and early 1980s and related tendencies that broke with the more austere aspects of Post-Minimalism and Conceptualism.
[5] Many of the artists featured in her gallery were involved in the P and D movement including Miriam Schapiro, Izhar Patkin, Valerie Jaudon, Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt, Kim MacConnel and Ned Smyth.