Gold attended The High School of Music & Art and later went on to study at Hunter College and Columbia University before graduating from Pratt Institute with a BFA in painting.

[13] Through the years, her work has experienced a variety of transformations that follow a clear and gradual path from monochromatic abstraction and existentialism to direct representation.

The cruciform bands apparent within these paintings are determined by systematic painterly choices existing in Gold's underpaintings that remain exposed in the final piece.

Donald Kuspit creates a comparison between Gold and her peers working with existential formalism: ""Sharon Gold's paintings are a significant part of this subjectivization, in that they make an advance in tension without positing an advance in expressionism, without moving into the exaggerated expressionism that seems to be proposed by both body art and environmental art.

"[15] In 1979, Gold broke from the monochromatic process to create paintings that allowed first for the intuitive composition of space and later for painterly mark making.

With the removal of the monochromatic surface, geometric forms pull to the foreground of the paintings, which were realized by Gold "in accordance with my sense of intuition and reason.

These paintings maintain the materiality and concern for surface that exist in her earlier monochrome and geometric works while taking on the illusion of nature as a subject.

These works, while ostensibly abstract and geometric, become deeply personal conversations with the oval as a stand in for portraits in, for instance, a family tree.

The ovals take on glowingly articulated personalities often expressed through colors and variations in size to develop family and conversational hierarchies.

Nevertheless, her previous work is some of the best of it is breed, and, what is more, one can trace in it the origins of her current iconography...As evocative as these paintings are, they never stray far from the no-nonsense materiality of the hardest-core post-Minimalist abstraction.

Paradoxically, it is in their very materiality – in particular the undulating crests of underpainting – that one may discern the source of the extended, organic forms that Gold has pursued into the lyrically associate terrain she is exploring today.

Gold's Seeing Subjects series began in 1994 as a representational depiction of women in the past, present, and future, and they begin to invite overt feminist interpretations.

The website is an attempt at the translation of paintings, digital prints, and photographs from the physical gallery space to the virtual landscape of the internet.

These titles are presented in the timeline as monochromatic and opaque buttons that obscure Gold's artwork until the user scrolls over the top of them.

The relationship between text, image and meaning become interchangeable - reflecting Sharon Gold’s densely layered, creative process and her continued exploration of visual semiotics."

Antique dolls gang up to take on gendered identity in Posse; Foucault’s Panopticon is renovated in In House and transformed into a child’s plaything.

These portraits take on a heavily cropped and zoomed-in perspective that forces the viewer into an uncomfortable and urgent position aimed at eliciting outward emotional responses.

In 1975, she presented a performance and audio work at Pratt Institute titled Minimal, Post-Minimal, Conceptual Art: Running Piece.

Together with co-director Elaine Hartnett, Sharon Gold ran the Performance and Video Workshop New York city group from 1975 through 1978.

In 1988, Gold was commissioned to make a public painting for the Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority at the Humboldt-Hospital Station east entrance in Buffalo, New York.

She is an associate professor of painting and has influenced hundreds of artists during her academic career, including William Powhida, Paul Weiner, and Letha Wilson.

[23] At Syracuse, she has developed courses in critical studies including Decoding Images of Representation and Professional Practices in Visual Arts.

Gold's Decoding Images of Representation course covers a wide range of writings concerning critical theory and modes of thinking that apply to the production of imagery.

The course is a forum for Gold's discussion-based pedagogical mode through which her students apply the concepts they have read about to their own artwork and that of their peers in contextualized critiques.

Decoding Images of Representation extends from the world of visual culture into sociopolitical affairs and power studies related to gender, race, and contemporary issues.

Gold was a panelist on Race/Image/Gender at Syracuse University for Celebrate Difference week in 1990 and served as the panel chair on Abstract Pictures/Abstract Paintings for the College Art Association Conference that same year.