Jack Goldstein lived and worked in southern California and New York City. Born to a Jewish family in Montreal in 1945, Goldstein moved to the West Coast when he was 16.

He studied in the late 1960's at the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles and then at the newly founded California Institute of the Arts under John Baldessari. In 1972, he became one of the first recipients of a CalArts Master of Fine Arts degree, and in 1977 was included in the seminal exhibition Pictures at Artists Space in New York.

He was planning an exhibition of paintings in Los Angeles at the time of his death in San Bernardino, California in 2003. Goldstein’s work appeared in the 2004 Whitney Biennial, shortly after his death.