From 1973 to 1983, Solomon's work was exhibited at four museums (High Museum of Art, New Orleans Museum of Art, Butler Institute of American Art, and Berkshire Museum). Much of his sales of large-scale paintings were to Altanta architects and designers during the rapid growth of corporate headquarters construction throughout the 1970s. The exhibition of Solomon's work at the MFA’s Barbara and Steven Grossman Gallery in May 2016 marked his fifth museum installation.
From 1984 to 2003, Solomon set aside his art career to support his two children, working as an international market consultant specializing in consumer retention. A hospital error during radiation treatment in late 2003 caused irreparable damage to his spine as an incurable, progressive nerve root disease began to compromise his mobility. Despite the increasingly intense pain, he returned to the studio in 2013 after friends mounted a retrospective of his early work, and in September 2014, he entered the graduate program at the MFA's Museum School.
Solomon began working on aluminum in Fall 2014, after conducting tests that proved the metal's superior ability to push color language. His work is defined by an intense color architecture consisting of multiple layers of interwoven pigment and light, enabled by aluminum's push attributes. He earned his MFA from Tufts University in May 2016 - 42 years after receiving his BFA from Pratt, and he taught art history at Mount Wachusett Community College in Gardner, MA for the Fall 2017 semester.
Also in 2014 Solomon began researching for his authorized biography about an overlooked second-generation abstract expressionist – Joseph Stapleton (1921-1994), with whom he studied at Pratt. In early 2015, Solomon began lecturing about Stapleton and also about the New York City art environment in which Stapleton worked. Then in August 2017, Stapleton's remaining family gave up all rights to the drawings and Solomon was appointed right holder to the entire Joseph Stapleton Drawings Collection. The Collection, which was removed from the artist's Tri-be-ca studio upon his death in January 1994 and put into storage, consists of nearly 5,500 never before seen drawings dating from 1938 to 1993. In October 2017 Solomon gave a presentation about Stapleton at the Art Students League of New York, where Stapleton taught for more than 20 years - concurrently with his instruction at Pratt.
The Collection is in the process of being photographed, cataloged, and archived. Beginning November 2019 various drawings series from the Collection will be made available for faculty and student research on the Artstor and JSTOR platforms at schools having an ITHAKA subscription. The Collection is planned to be launched on Omeka's platform in the near future - making the work available to curators and collectors. (See Joseph Stapleton Drawings Collection tab on this web site).
Solomon resides in Newton Highlands, MA. He has two sons, one, a world renowned aquatic ecologist who taught Environment at McGill University and who is now a lead scientist at Cary Institute, an iimportant environment think tank. Solomon's other son is Senior Vice President at 12th Man Foundation, the funding arm of Texas A&M's sports program. Solomon has five grandchildren.
