Margaret Cogswell (born 1947) is a mixed-media installation artist and sculptor based in New York.Braff, Phyllis. "Relationships Between Women and Men," The New York Times, October 6, 1996. Retrieved October 31, 2022.Wang, Nanming. "Water Soundings: Conversations with Margaret Cogswell," Art Observation, October 2015.Heartney, Eleanor. "Margaret Cogswell, 101 Wooster," ARTnews, December 1990. She emerged in late 1980s as a sculptor, gaining attention for abstract constructions exploring tensions between natural and human-made materials, roughness and sophistication.Kimmelman, Michael. "Sculptors Make a Case for Expressionism," The New York Times, August 19, 1988. Retrieved October 31, 2022.Mahoney, Robert. "New York Review," Arts Magazine, November 1988.Harrison, Helen. "Blurring Artistic Distinctions," The New York Times, July 8, 1990. Retrieved October 31, 2022. Since 2003, Cogswell's work has focused on a series of site-specific installations called "River Fugues": individually unique, multimedia projects involving detailed geographical, historical and social research that explore the intertwining of rivers, industry, people's lives, and the increasingly politicized role of water.Heartney, Eleanor. "Margaret Cogswell: Cuyahoga Fugues", Cleveland, OH: SPACES World Artist Program, 2003.Knowles, Carol. "Archetypes: Works by Margaret Cogswell and Tad Kauritzen Wright," Memphis Flyer, October 23–28, 2008, p. 38.Benson, John. "A visual exploration of Cle’s Crooked River," Cool Cleveland, January 2012. Retrieved October 31, 2022.Yang, Fan. "Water Soundings," Global Times, November 13, 2014, p. 3. The series' title invokes the contrapuntal musical form of the fugue to indicate the weaving of disparate voices, layers and media (video, audio, sculptural elements, works on paper) into a harmonious, composite whole.Wei, Lilly. "Considering Red Hook," Soundings: Margaret Cogswell, Ellen Driscoll, Brooklyn, NY: Kentler International Drawing Space, 2015.Art Daily. "Margaret Cogswell's 'River Fugues: Moving The Water(S)' opens at the CUE Art Foundation," April 2014. Retrieved October 31, 2022.Hix, Harvey. "Moving Water: Margaret Cogswell's 'Wyoming River Fugues,'" [www.worldcat.org/oclc/881473071 Wyoming River Fugues], Laramie, WY: University of Wyoming Art Museum, 2012. Retrieved October 31, 2022. Critic Lilly Wei described the "River Fugues" as a hybrid form based on musical composition that "expresses the complex beauty of rivers … and sounds an alarm over the sweeping environmental changes that have endangered our natural resources."Wei, Lilly. "Autobiographies of Water," in River Fugues: Margaret Cogswell, Brooklyn, NY: Margaret Cogswell 2018.
Cogswell has exhibited at institutions including the Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels (BOZAR),Artworks for Change. "Melting Ice/A Hot Topic." Retrieved October 27, 2022. Zendai Zhujiajiao Art Museum (Shanghai), Mid-Manhattan Library,New York Public Library. "Moving the Waters, Catskill Dreams: New York City’s Liquid Assets, Margaret Cogswell and Diane Galusha," Events. Retrieved October 31, 2022. Hallwalls,Hallwalls. Margaret Cogswell, Artists. Retrieved October 27, 2022. Wave Hill,Hershenon, Roberta. "Weather Interpreted," The New York Times, August 7, 2005. Retrieved October 31, 2022. and the Field Museum of Natural History (Chicago). She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts and Pollock-Krasner Foundation, among others.John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Margaret Cogswell, Fellows. Retrieved October 27, 2022.Pollock-Krasner Foundation. Margaret Cogswell, Artists. Retrieved October 27, 2022. After being based in New York City since her early career, Cogswell lives and works upstate in the Catskill Park area.Roll Magazine. "Moving the Waters, Ashokan Fugues," August, 2016. Retrieved October 31, 2022.
Early life and career Cogswell was born in Memphis, Tennessee) in 1947, and at age eighteen months moved with her Presbyterian missionary parents to Japan, where they lived for the next twelve years.Beals, Kathie. "Everything under one roof," Gannett Press, December, 1979.Moynihan, Martin. "The art around us: sculptor finds self-expression in the least likely places," Sunday Times Union, February 24, 1991, p. H-2. After returning to the U.S., she missed conversing in Japanese and eventually turned to the visual arts, in part to overcome the expressive limitations of language.Goldfarb, Myra Yellin. "Hammers and torches are the tools of their trade," The Morning Call, January 24, 1992. She majored in English literature at Rhodes College, receiving a BA degree in 1969. From 1974 to 1976, she studied sculpture at University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, before enrolling at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University, where she earned an MFA in sculpture in 1982.CUE Art Foundation. Margaret Cogswell. Retrieved October 27, 2022.
Cogswell's earliest sculpture had an architectural emphasis, as in Flying Buttresses (1979), a vertical work of stacked sheets of green plate glass and black metal that recalled Gothic cathedrals; she also created site-specific installations for the dance performance, Floored (1981), by Lisa Fox at The Kitchen.Anderson Jack. "'Floored' by Lisa Fox", The New York Times, December 14, 1981. Retrieved October 31, 2022.Dregin, Lois. "Dance Picks," Soho News, December 9-–5, 1981. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Cogswell began receiving wider attention for abstract constructions exhibited in group shows at the World Trade Center, Korean Cultural Center, Katonah Museum of Art, and Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art,Melrod, George. "Cross-Currents: Korean Cultural Center," ARTnews, March 1992.Fressola, Michael J. "'Beyond Gender' at the Newhouse," Staten Island Advance, December 29, 1995. as well as for solo exhibitions in Japan and at 101 Wooster.Ozawa, Yasuyuki. Review, Hokuriku Art Magazine, March 1994.Arasa, Tanaka. "'Memento Mori', Margaret Cogswell," Apro Magazine, March 1995. During that time, she also began teaching studio art at State University of New York at Purchase, Parsons School of Design, and Rhode Island School of Design, among other schools.
Work
Cogswell's wide-ranging influences include modernist and postminimalist sculpture, literature and Japanese culture. She has long been interested in the relationship of images to language and poetry; her earlier work employed arrangement and juxtaposition of materials to give form to interior moments and spaces, and often provided clues to meaning through evocative titles.Robins, Corinne. Women and Wood: Metaphor In Form, Katonah, NY: Katonah Museum of Art, 1993.Fox, Marilyn J. "Diverse sculpture show exciting," Reading Times, February 13, 1992. Her later "River Fugues" rely more on a polyphonic mix of different media rather than materials to create what writers have described as visual and aural "tone poems" investigating the changing circumstances and life of various rivers.
Earlier sculpture and installations Cogswell's early sculpture centered on abstract constructions using basic natural and human-made materials—most often rough-hewn wood (sometimes marked with expressive chainsaw kerfs), steel plates and rods, and tension wire. This work explored the intrinsic beauty of these materials in compositions that alluded to rhythms of nature, social systems, structures and the tenuousness of life, or served as concrete expressions of emotional states (e.g., Inexplicable Longings, 1989).Tyson, Janet. "Excellence '89 show", Fort Worth Star-Telegram, July 24, 1989.
Writers such as The New York Times'''s Michael Kimmelman commented on formal and conceptual tensions within the work: hard versus soft, smooth versus rough, light versus dark, brute versus meditative, and primitive versus sophisticated. For example, the large assemblage Weighted Planes Rise Toward a New Desire (1988) consisted of a slender, lyrical metal arch that connected a heap of metal sheets topped by an unfinished wood block with another in which the materials were reversed.Zimmer, William. "New York: 'The Candor of Form,'" Sculpture, November/December, 1988.Temin, Christine. "Treading Lightly on the Landscape," The Boston Globe, August 5, 1990. ARTnews critic Eleanor Heartney suggested that Cogswell's approach to form, material and arrangement bore the influence of her time in Japan, yielding eloquent, sometimes playful works with an "uneasy tension [and] precariously maintained balance … heightened by our awareness of the very different properties of wood and steel." She described the sculpture Silenced: No Space (1990), as a "dramatic interaction" that reversed expectations by placing lengths of steel girder within the vise-like grip of two pieces of rough wood, their extremities shooting out.
In subsequent installations, Cogswell delved into new materials and linear tensions, often created through enclosures or frames made of steel or wood.Koplos, Janet. "55 Ferris Street II," Art in America, February, 1993.Gold, Donna. "Blum Gallery, 'The Parthenon and Other Mythologies,'" Art New England, February/March, 1996. Inside Yoknapatapha (Middlebury College, 1992) was inspired by the novels of William Faulkner, and consisted of a visceral environment of five separate elements composed of wood, steel, concrete, bluestone, beeswax and tar that evoked the volatility of nature and the layerings and conflicts of societies. In works such as Memento Mori (Newhouse Center, 1995) and "The Parthenon and Other Mythologies" (Parthenon Museum, 1995), Cogswell created mysterious, shrine-like environments that incorporated hanging lengths of tarred straw rope, sheets of wire mesh covered with newspaper or prints embedded in plaster and/or wax, calligraphic knotted and unknotted ropes, and materials used in rituals, such as straw and salt.Wibking, Angela. "Parthenon Art Project Is All In The Family," Nashville Business Journal, June 24–28, 1995, p. 13, 15.Bischoff, Dan. "Sculptors Share Space at Museum," The Star-Ledger, March 6, 1998. Memento Mori was recreated at the Newhouse Center after first being installed in an abandoned temple in Kanazawa, Japan. Parthenon was a collaboration with her brother, painter Jim Cogswell, that was based on the original Greek structure (and its Nashville replica) and used suspended books and records and hanging prints to represent, respectively, plumb bobs and columns.Ribar, David. "Revisiting History," Nashville Scene, August 24, 1995, p. 39. Reviews described these installations of the 1990s as poignant and raw evocations of memory, ritual and connection to the historical and mythical past.
"River Fugues" and water-related works Cogswell first engaged the subject of water (as well as the use of sound and video) in the site-specific installations, Thirst (1999) and Thirst (Elegy for Esther) (Islip Art Museum, 2001), which respectively examined physical properties and rituals related to water. Those projects prompted her work during a 2003 SPACES World Artist Program residency in Cleveland, in which she traveled the length of the local Cuyahoga River, exploring its nature, recreational use, steel mills and other industries.Utter, Douglas Max. "Making the Wind – Elements @ SPACES," Angle, June 2003, p. 16–7. Her site-specific response to that research became Cuyahoga Fugues (2003), a weaving of generations of celebratory and elegiac river stories—gathered from steel workers, environmentalists, fishermen, city planners, an historian and children—told through a deceptively simple duct work installation, video projections and captured local sounds.