Charlotte Park was born in Concord, Massachusetts in 1918. From 1935 to 1939 she studied at the Yale School of Fine Arts in New Haven, Connecticut. She moved to New York City in 1945 and studied privately with Australian artist Wallace Harrison, who also instructed noted abstract artist Helen Frankenthaler.
In New York, Park met fellow artist James Brooks and two years later, they married. Brooks and Park soon became part of the circle of Jackson Pollock and his wife Lee Krasner. They rented a studio space that had been occupied by Pollock and joined Pollock and Krasner, along with other young artists working in new styles, in establishing studios on Long Island. They stayed first in Montauk, but after their studio was destroyed by a hurricane in 1954, they moved to a cottage in Springs, East Hampton, which became their full-time residence. Although she was overshadowed by her husband during their careers, Park was an important member of the growing artistic community on Long Island.
Throughout the 1950s, Park exhibited regularly at the prominent Stable Gallery in New York and was included in the Whitney Museum of American Art Annual Exhibition of 1935. Park also taught early in her career at the Dalton School in New York in 1951, as well as at the Museum of Modern Art, New York from 1955-57.
In the 1950s, Park exhibited her work broadly. She participated in her first group exhibition in 1952 at the Peridot Gallery, New York. In 1953, her works were included in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s painting annual and at Tanager Gallery’s annual exhibition. From 1954 to 1958 she exhibited in the Stable Gallery’s annual shows, a continuation of the 1951 Ninth Street Show. Her first solo show was at Tanager Gallery in 1957. In deference to her husband, however, she began to withdraw from the art world in the 1960s, a position many women artists took during this time. Charlotte Park did not exhibit her work publicly again until 1973 when a solo show of her art was held at the Elaine Benson Gallery in Bridgehampton, New York. In the twenty years that followed, she was included in numerous exhibitions on Long Island and in New York City. She was also represented in Seventeen Abstract Artists of East Hampton: The Pollock Years, 1946-1956, held in 1979 at the American Cultural Center of the United States Embassy in Paris. In 2003, Park’s art was featured, along with that of Dan Christensen and Allan Wexler in the exhibition, Three East End Artists, held at the Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill. In 2013, the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center held a solo exhibition of her work.
Park’s paintings have been included in a number of museum and gallery exhibitions in recent years, including Setareh Gallery, Düsseldorf, Germany (2018-2019); Columbia Museum of Art, South Carolina (2019); Kasmin Gallery, New York (2019); Art Student’s League, New York (2019); and Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York (2021), among many others. Park’s work is included in the collections of American University, Washington D.C.; Columbia Museum of Art, South Carolina; Guild Hall, East Hampton, New York; The Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Telfair Museums, Savannah, Georgia; and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut.