Sam Goodman was born in Toronto in 1919, where he would grow up in a working class family. At the outbreak of the Second World War, he found work with the Film Board of Canada, receiving and documenting photographs of the events unfolding in Europe. His work necessitated his coming face to face with the first captured images of Nazi atrocities committed across the continent and carried out in concentration camps, which deeply impacted him as a Jewish man.
In 1947 Goodman moved to New York City and began painting in an Abstract Expressionist style. Goodman was connected with the collective Camino Gallery, and after meeting like-minded artist Boris Lurie he joined the March Gallery. Sometime early in their friendship, Goodman gave Lurie a collection of documentary photos of the camps that he had collected, while working for the Film Board of Canada, and he provided Lurie with the stimulus to utilize them in his work. During Goodman's time exhibiting at the March Gallery he participated in the Vulgar, Involvement, and Doom shows. He exhibited aggressive works, consisting of burned dolls, everyday objects, or objects discovered in the trash. These found objects became instilled with symbolic and iconographic significance. Goodman's art was directly influenced by his war experiences and a fundamental discontent with the growing commercialization that was affecting art.
In 1964 he, with Boris Lurie, mounted the infamous NO Sculpture Show [Shit Show] at Gallery: Gertrude Stein. The show consisted of 21 shit sculptures displayed directly on the gallery floor. Critic Dore Ashton wrote that the NO Sculpture Show [Shit Show] "... was a statement of the nihilistic, anarchic values that the subculture had long been generating."
He died in New York in 1967.