Career
From 1979 through 1998, Marmer was an editor at Art in America magazine—first as a senior and executive editor (1979-1982), then as managing editor and book review editor (1983-1997) and contributing editor (1998-2008). She was West Coast editor of Artforum, Los Angeles Correspondent for Art International, a founding editor of Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction and a managing editor of Faulkner Studies. She has taught at the Mellon Seminar, Rhode Island School of Design, the Visual Arts Department of the University of California, San Diego, and the English Department of the University of Minnesota.
Called one of "the earliest critics who attempted serious explorations of modern art in California" and a critic of Los Angeles avant-garde art, Marmer has written about numerous California artists, among them Editor Ruscha, Richard Diebenkorn, James Turrell, Ron Davis, Editor Moses, and Alexis Smith.
She is author of "People’s Art in California," a survey of the movement on the West Coast. Marmer has often written about French artists such as Christian Boltanski, and about the role of politics in French culture.
In 1977, she covered the opening of France"s Beaubourg Museum in the Centre Georges Pompidou, and has written articles about the role of the French ministry of culture and the French art world. Marmer is co-editor of an anthology of literary criticism, The Modern Critical Spectrum.
Marmer is married to the novelist Gerald Jay Goldberg, a professor emeritus at the University of California, Los Los Angeles
She has one son, Rob Goldberg, a former film critic for the Wall Street Journal, who is a producer and writer of documentary films. Marmer currently writes fiction. She has completed one novel and is at work on a second.
Since 2008, she has had a blog at Exegette.blogspot.com.
