Diana Cooper (born 1964) is an American visual artist, known for largely abstract, improvised hybrid constructions that combine drawing, painting, sculpture, installation and photography.Wei, Lilly. "Line Analysis," Art in America, April 2008, p. 154–7.MacAdams, Barbara. "Pink and Red and NASCAR Too," ARTnews, December 2012. Retrieved March 28, 2022.Knight, Christopher. "Random acts as part of the plan," Los Angeles Times, January 21, 2005. Retrieved March 28, 2022. Her art has evolved from canvas works centered on proliferating doodles to sprawling installations of multiplying elements and architectonic structures.Johnson, Ken. "Diana Cooper," The New York Times, March 13, 1998, p. E35. Retrieved March 28, 2022.Kaneda, Shirley and Saul Ostrow. "Diana Cooper," BOMB, Spring 2003.Wei, Lilly. "Diana Cooper," UrbanGlass Art Quarterly, Fall 2009. Critics have described her earlier work—primarily made with craft supplies such as markers, pens, foamcore, pushpins, felt, pipe cleaners, tape and pompoms—as humble-looking yet labor-intensive,Caniglia, Julie. "Diana Cooper," Artforum, December 2002. Retrieved March 29, 2022. provisional and precarious,Asper, Colleen. "Diana Cooper," Beautiful/Decay, Issue W, 2007/ and "a high-wire act attempting to balance order and pandemonium." They note parallels to earlier abstract women artists such as Eva Hesse, Lee Bontecou, Elizabeth Murray, and Yayoi Kusama.Crutchfield, Margo A. and Barbara Pollack. Beyond the Line: the Art of Diana Cooper, Cleveland/New York: Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland/Distributed Art Publishers, 2007. Retrieved March 28, 2022.Smith, Roberta. "Diana Cooper," The New York Times, February 14, 1997, p. C32. Retrieved March 28, 2022. Lilly Wei, however, identifies an "absurdist playfulness and Orwellian intimations" in Cooper's work that occupy a unique place in contemporary abstraction.
Cooper has received the Rome Prize,American Academy in Rome. "American Academy in Rome Announces 2003-2004 Rome Prize Winners," Press. Retrieved March 28, 2022. a Guggenheim Fellowship,John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Diana Cooper, Fellows. Retrieved March 28, 2022. and awards from the Anonymous Was A Woman,Anonymous Was a Woman. Recipients. Retrieved March 28, 2022. Pollock-Krasner and Joan Mitchell foundations.Pollock-Krasner Foundation. Diana Cooper, Artists. Retrieved March 31, 2022. She has been commissioned to create public artworks for New York City and the Moss Arts Center at Virginia Tech,Virginia Tech. "New public art installation will transform the walls of the Moss Arts Center Grand Lobby," Articles. Retrieved March 29, 2022.MTA Arts Design. "Art Along the Way." Retrieved March 29, 2022. and her work has been acquired by the Museum of Fine Arts Boston,Museum of Fine Arts Boston. "Tidal Pool, Diana Cooper," Collections. Retrieved January 19, 2024. the British Museum and the Pinakothek der Moderne (Munich).The British Museum. Drawing, Diana Cooper, Collection. Retrieved March 29, 2022.Pinakothek der Moderne. Diana Cooper. Artists. Retrieved May 13, 2022. Cooper is based in Brooklyn, New York and is married to the scholar and essayist Mark Lilla.Lanfranco, Katerina. "Seeing the World Anew: POVarts in the Studio with Diana Cooper," POV Arts, December 2, 2019. Retrieved March 31, 2022.
Early life and career Cooper was born in Greenwich, Connecticut in 1964 to Ian and Faith Cooper, who were both artists and teachers at private schools.Pollack, Barbara. "Deliberate Doodles and Random Thoughts," Beyond the Line: the Art of Diana Cooper, Cleveland/New York: Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland/Distributed Art Publishers, 2007. Retrieved March 28, 2022. She was drawn to dance and choreography in her youth, but turned to the visual arts while majoring in history and literature at Harvard University (BA, 1986). After graduating, she took courses at the New York Studio School, before earning an MFA in painting from Hunter College in 1997.
Cooper began exhibiting doodle-based works on canvas in the latter 1990s. She appeared in group shows at the New Museum and Knitting Factory and gained early notice for solo exhibitions at Ah! Space Gallery (1997) and Postmasters Gallery (1998) in New York. Since then, she has continued to exhibit at Postmasters, and in 2007 received a ten-year retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland in 2007.Waxman, Lori. "Diana Cooper," Artforum, March 2005. Retrieved March 29, 2022.Saltz, Jerry. "Critic’s Pick," New York Magazine, January 28, 2013. She has also appeared in exhibitions at the Whitney Museum at Altria,The New Yorker. "Goings on About Town: Burgeoning Geometries," February 2–5, 2007. MoMA PS1, The Drawing Room (London),Wood, Jon. Diana Cooper, Hew Locke, London: Drawing Room, 2004. Retrieved March 29, 2022. SculptureCenter,Glueck, Grace. "Personal Abstractions," The New York Times, February 16, 2001, p. E39. Retrieved March 28, 2022. Contemporary Arts Center (Cincinnati), Sharjah Art Museum (United Arab Emirates),Sharjah Museum of Art. 6th Sharjah Biennial, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates: Sharjah Museum of Art, 2003. and He Xiangning Art Museum (China), among others.He Xiangning Art Museum. The Logic of Paper: American Works on Paper, Shenzhen, China: He Xiangning Art Museum, 2010. Since 2008, Cooper has been an adjunct associate professor at Columbia University's School of the Arts.Columbia University School of the Arts. Diana Cooper, Profiles. Retrieved April 22, 2022.Columbia University School of the Arts. "Adjunct Associate Professor Diana Cooper in Retrospective," News, March 19, 2018. Retrieved May 2, 2022.
Work and reception Cooper is known for her ability to extend two-dimensional sensibilities and geometries into three dimensional "hybrid constructions" and installations.Delgado, Lisa. "Diana Cooper," The Architect's Newspaper, February 2008. She often relies on reduced color—keying works to one or two primary hues—and simple shapes as basic units, translating thoughts, experiences, emotions and information into abstract visual language. Her use of line, grid and form has been linked to artists such as Mondrian, the Constructivists, minimalists Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt and Tony Smith, and Peter Halley, but is more directly connected to accumulative artists such as Judy Pfaff, Jessica Stockholder and Sarah Sze.Macfarlane, Kate and Katherine Stout. "Spatial Drawing," The Drawing Book, London: Black Dog Publishers. Retrieved March 28, 2022.Smith, Roberta. "Diana Cooper," The New York Times, September 17, 1997, p. E36. Retrieved March 28, 2022.White, Roger. "Diana Cooper," The Brooklyn Rail, April 2005. Retrieved March 29, 2022. Critic David Cohen has distinguished her from the latter group, identifying a "divided sensibility" that maintains both a handmade, casually obsessive mode and a systematizing one committed to taxonomies of form and function.Cohen, David. "Mappa Mundi: Diana Cooper at the Studio School," Artcritical, April 15, 2018. Retrieved March 28, 2022. He wrote that all of her work—regardless of format or scale—remains in the orbit of drawing, poised between doodle and collage and operating "as a way of being in the world."
Canvases and wall reliefs By the mid-1990s, Cooper abandoned painting in favor of a more personal form of expression involving expansive, Sharpie-marker doodles on canvas stapled to walls.Griffin, Tim. "Diana Cooper," Art in America, November 1998.Schjeldahl, Peter. "Thanks for Painting," The Village Voice, March 17, 1998.Gleeson, David. "Diana Cooper," TimeOut (UK), November 15–22, 2000. In these works, tiny lines and circles (generally red, yellow, blue or black) accumulated to form dense networks, grids and mazes. The Black One (1997) is a representative work—a monochromatic canvas covered in black doodles, its surface embellished with metastasizing protrusions of pipe-cleaner chutes and ladders, pockets of pompoms, tape and construction netting. Reviews noted these labyrinthine designs for their graphic skill, sense of improvisation, and play of organic (cells), informational (maps, architectural plans) and technological (electrical circuitry, computer chips, bar codes, pixels) allusions.Dailey, Meghan. "Diana Cooper," Artforum, December 1999. Retrieved March 29, 2022. New York Times critic Ken Johnson wrote, "Cooper's additive process is not uncontrolled. Out of the tension between structures of order and containment and impulses of transgression and expansion, grows a ramshackle architecture or a kind of schematic model of the mind at play."
In later works, Cooper explored more varied and elaborate formats whose elements spilled off canvases onto walls and floors.Griffin, Tim. "Diana Cooper," TimeOut, September 30-October 7, 1999. Los Angeles Times critic Christopher Knight situated these wall reliefs (e.g., My Eye Travels, 2005) between self-contained drawings and "environmental deluge," likening them to visualizations of the ways computer viruses might work: "Havoc occurs through precise channels of organization, manic energy merges with exacting control and data seem to wobble between ferocious and benign. The structure of her art is a hybrid of machine regularity and human caprice."
Installations and sculptural works In the 2000s, Cooper expanded her practice to include furniture-like sculptures and full installations that increasingly colonized their exhibition spaces.Glueck, Grace. "Off the Wall," The New York Times, September 30, 2005. Retrieved March 28, 2022.Scott, Andrea K. “Burgeoning Geometries," The New York Times, January 5, 2007. Retrieved March 31, 2022.The Architects Newspaper. "Constructed Abstractions," January 11, 2007.Carrier, David. "Diana Cooper," Artforum, February 2008. Retrieved March 29, 2022. Speedway (2000–3) was a freestanding, De Stijl-styled foamcore structure, consisting on one side of a cutaway that Nancy Princenthal described as "a Las Vegas marquee of pulsing concentric and parallel lines, punctuated by seedily alluring little niches,"Princenthal, Nancy. "Diana Cooper," Art in America, November 2002. and on the other, a dollhouse-like grid of cubbyholes, suggesting a Mondrian/Donald Judd-influenced "mini-museum." The mutating, increasingly elaborate installation Orange Alert UK (2003–8) employed taut linear arrangements of vivid reds, oranges and yellows, initially inspired by the color-coded, post-9/11 terrorist alert system, which formed cardiograph-like wall patterns and radiated from a central, spider-like form.The Drawing Room. "Diana Cooper & Hew Locke," Exhibitions. Retrieved May 11, 2022.
Photo-derived work Digital photography and themes involving the built environment play a greater role in Cooper's later work, which has employed fewer elements and sometimes taken on a frieze-like appearance (e.g., the illusionistic wall-piece, Undercover, 2010–3).Pollack, Barbara. "Diana Cooper, 'My Eye Travels,'" Time Out (New York), February 14, 2013. Retrieved March 31, 2022.Brody, David. "Site Specific: Diana Cooper and Lee Boroson," Artcritical,, March 28, 2017. Retrieved March 31, 2022.Indrisek, Scott. "Singing Mussels, Swimming Pools, and Airplants: This Is Sculpture," Artinfo, June 20, 2014. She uses photography to create sketchbook-like collections of abstract forms taken from everyday experience—details of airport tarmacs, subway seats, grass, refuse, construction fencing, or gallery architecture—which she re-presents out of context, revealing neglected qualities of beauty and strangeness or to create hyperreal spatial illusions (e.g., Skylight I, 2012–3). Jerry Saltz described her 2013 show, "My Eye Travels," as "a florid blaze of color, pattern, abstraction, and images of bits of the world," composed almost entirely of photographs "assembled into fragmenting mandalas of contemporary energy."