Barbara Cooper (born 1949) is an American artist whose practice encompasses abstract sculpture, public and installation art, drawing and set design.Craig, Gerry. "Barbara Cooper," Sculpture, October 2000, p. 76.Miro, Marsha. "Sculptures by Barbara Cooper," Fiberarts, January/February 2001, p. 56–7.Cassidy, Victor. Artistic Collaboration Today: Profiles of Creative Teams in Diverse Media, Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2018. Retrieved December 9, 2019. She is most known for her sculpture, which emphasizes process, handcraft, and its basis in natural forms and processes of transformation, such as growth, protection and regeneration.Shermeta, Margo. "Contemporary Sculpture: A Question of Elegance," Fiberarts, Summer 1991, p. 22–7.Abell, Jeff. "Barbara Cooper: Fassbender Gallery, Chicago," C International, November 1998–January 1999, p. 44.Leucking, Stephen. "Biomorphs: Organic Abstraction and the Mechanics of Life," Sculpture, January/February 2000, p. 38–43.Cassidy, Victor. "Barbara Cooper at the Chicago Cultural Center," Art in America, April 2007, p. 148. Critic Polly Ullrich writes that "Cooper's hand-intensive art is an art of condensation" that takes "the flow of time and growth as a subject";Ullrich, Polly. "Barbara Cooper: Layering Time," American Craft, February/March 2000, p. 66–9. that quality often leads writers to align Cooper with postminimalism.Thodos, Diane. "Barbara Cooper," New Art Examiner, April 2001, p. 52.Snodgrass, Susan. "An Art of Essence: The Sculpture and Drawing of Barbara Cooper," Chicago: Northern Illinois University Art Museum, 1995. John Brunetti describes her work as "sinuous, tactile sculptures [that] quietly juxtapose conceptual and formal dichotomies, among them the organic and man-made, the feminine and the masculine, movement and stasis."Brunetti, John. "Barbara Cooper, re: Growth," Barbara Cooper, re: Growth, Bellevue, WA: Bellevue Arts Museum, 2007.
Cooper has exhibited at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (MCA), Hafnarfjördur Centre of Culture and Fine Art (Iceland), and Bellevue Arts Museum, and been commissioned for public art works in cities including Chicago, Toledo, and Providence.Luxe Magazine. "Style Makers: The Naturalist, Barbara Cooper,” April 2010, p. 117–8.Fornek, Kimberly. "Hinsdale Library's latest addition is airborne," Chicago Tribune, April 10, 2015. Retrieved December 9, 2019. Her work has been discussed in diverse publications, among them, Art in America, Arts Magazine,Hixson, Kathryn. "Chicago in Review," Arts Magazine, February 1989, p. 106–7. Sculpture,Haddad, Amy. "Barbara Cooper," Sculpture, December 2000, p. 69–70. FiberartsSheply, Carol Ferring. "Innovations in Textile Art," Fiberarts, November/December 1999, p. 49–53. and American Craft,Rice, Robin. "Modus Operandi," American Craft, February/March 1999, p. 66–9.Ullrich, Polly. "From Limb to Limb," New Art Examiner, December 1999/January 2000, p. 46.McCracken, David. "Sculptors Share Flair for Experimentation," Chicago Tribune, June 7, 1991, p. 74. and belongs to public art collections including the Smithsonian Museum, MCA Chicago, and Long Beach Museum of Art.Smithsonian American Art Museum. "Ova, Barbara Cooper," Artwork. Retrieved December 9, 2019.Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. "Barbara Cooper," Artists. Retrieved December 9, 2019.Catalani, Stefano. Barbara Cooper, re: Growth, Bellevue, WA: Bellevue Arts Museum, 2007.
Early life and career Cooper was born and raised in Philadelphia; her father was a biochemist and that influence is evident in her art.Lackey, Jane. "Barbara Cooper, Spiritus, 1990," Cranbrook Art Museum: 100 Treasures, Bloomfield Hills, MI: Cranbrook Art Museum, 2004. Retrieved December 9, 2019. She studied fiber art at the Cleveland Institute of Art (BFA, 1974) and Cranbrook Academy of Art (MFA, 1977), before turning to sculpture influenced by artists such as Eva Hesse Jackie Winsor, and Giuseppe Penone and the Arte Povera movement. After graduating, she headed Syracuse University's fiber department, before moving to Bozeman, Montana in 1979 for a position teaching sculpture and drawing at Montana State University.Cox, Erinn. "Artist Barbara Cooper Reveals the Invisible: In Art, In Nature, In Life," Louise & Maurice, June 29, 2015. Retrieved December 9, 2019. In 1986, she relocated to Chicago, where she has taught at the Art Institute of Chicago (1987–2009) and Harper College (1988–2001).Sundell, Ivy. Living Artists, Crow Woods Publishing, 2005, p. 58–59. Retrieved December 9, 2019.
During her first decade of professional exhibition, Cooper was featured in solo shows at the Yellowstone Art Museum (1985), Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland (1985) and Artemisia Gallery (Chicago, 1987, 1988), and group shows at the Evanston Art Center, Hyde Park Art Center and Randolph Street Gallery, among others.McClelland, Elizabeth. "Powerful and Perverse," Cleveland Edition, April 4–10, 1985. In her later career, the Chicago Cultural Center (1994, 2006), Hafnarfjördur Centre (2003), John Michael Kohler Arts Center (2004), Bellevue Arts Museum (2007), and Gerald Peters (Santa Fe), Fassbender and Perimeter (both Chicago) galleries have held solo exhibitions of her work; she was also featured in the Smithsonian's "High Fiber" exhibition (2005). Cooper lives and works in Chicago.
Work and reception Critics often relate Cooper's work to postminimalist sculptors such as Magdalena Abakanowicz, Eva Hesse, Lenore Tawney and Jackie Winsor, who merged feminist concerns with process, the organic and craft with minimalist codes of repetition, geometric purity, and restraint. Writers also place her among a second generation of organic sculptors (including Joan Livingstone and Sheri Simons) who brought a new conceptual orientation and reductive elegance to fiber-related work,Nawrocki, Dennis Alan. "Barbara Cooper," Detroit, MI: Center for Creative Studies, 1992. or liken her art to that of Martin Puryear.
Cooper's work across media is united by several common themes: its basis in and abstraction of natural forms, temporal systems and patterns; a sense of movement that includes gesture, line and the activation of space; and its exploration of process and diverse materials.Carlisle, Susanna. "Affinity to Form: Artists Working in Wood," THE Magazine, November 2003, p. 41.Arechiga, Francisco. ""Barbara Cooper," THE Magazine, July 2007, p. 41. Curator Mary Jane Jacob wrote that "Cooper is fascinated by the 'brain' of nature," the way organisms respond to external stresses and need by producing unique growth patterns and distortions in order to build strength and resilience, repair and re-balance.Jacob, Mary Jane. "Undulating Memories of Time," Royal Oak, MI: Sybaris Gallery, 2000. In her mature, post-1987 work, Cooper employs working methods derived from both her early fiber training—plaiting and the organic, linear build of spinning and weaving—and studies of accretive natural phenomena, such as animal architecture, the growth of trees, or geological forces.Howard, Martha. "The Tension of Containment: A Sculpture Invitational," New Art Examiner, January 1992, p. 35.Fariello, M. Anna and Paula Owen, eds.. Objects and Meaning: New Perspectives in Art and Craft, Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2004, p. 197. Retrieved December 9, 2019.
Sculpture After moving to Chicago in 1987, Cooper began working with veneer scraps recycled from woodworking factories; the material connected her art to the greater ecological whole through a life cycle of extraction from nature, industrial processing and discard, and transformation into organic aesthetic forms.Hawkins, Margaret. "Elmhurst museum is home to more than rare Mies dwelling," Chicago Sun Times, March 1, 2002, p. 26. Her process involved methodically bending and layering the fragile veneer in loose, interlaced weaves that created undulating, penetrable skins or shell-like armor around hollow, biomorphic cores: cocoon, spiral, bulb, limb, vessel and nest forms.Bates, Geoffrey. "From Limb to Limb," The Living Museum, Vol. 60, No. 1, 1998, p. 9–12.
Arts critic Kathryn Hixson described works such as the vertical, six-foot Voluta (1988) as amassing seemingly random, curvilinear layerings "to form strong unified objects, almost mathematical in their purity and stability," which hover on walls "like protective presences." Susan Snodgrass and Fred Camper wrote that works, such as the coiled, vortex-like Cyclus, cocoon-like Plexus or undulating, pod-like Ova (all 1994), simultaneously allude to anthropomorphic figures, ancient fertility statues and scientific proofs, blurring boundaries between the natural and cultural, romantic and rational.Camper, Fred. "Frames of Reference," Chicago Reader, January 19, 1996, p. 22. Retrieved December 9, 2019.Sheply, Carol Ferring. "Basketry: A View from the Outer Edges," Fiberarts, September/October 1995, p. 56–7.Camper, Fred. "Dream Weavers," Chicago Reader, June 19, 1998, p. 46. Retrieved December 9, 2019.
In the late 1990s, critics identified a new intensity and frankness in Cooper's sculpture, which often features commanding, larger-than-human scaled tree-, column- or torso-like forms that express themes of vulnerability, healing, and ecological threat. Still influenced by natural building processes—the outward, ringed growth of trees, layering of cells in an embryo, bundling of fibers into muscle, or accretive forming of shells—this work incorporated new methods (dappled, fish-scale-like surfaces, visible drips of sap-like glue) and materials (junked automotive parts and cast steel) that conflate the organic and fabricated.
Works such as Columen (1998), Schist and Brace (both 2000) resemble limbless, fallen, split or cut trees with dripping glue suggesting the arrested vitality of a living thing. In others, like Mast (2000), Cooper uses veneer like sheaths or folds, alluding to wind-blown sails, clothing and the body, while other works reference the movement of water (rapids, waves) around obstacles; Fragment (1999) suggests a cache of coiled wood scrolls in a tree stump. Several works explore biological reactions such as burls or calluses in forms balanced between abstraction and natural references (hearts, limbs, bulbs);Castro, Jan Garden. "St. Louis Review: Baskets and Beyond," Sculpture, November 1999, p. 65–6. Burl (1997), Pomme (1998) and Corm (1999) incorporate a battered muffler layered with veneer, blackened steel sprouting vegetable roots, and bronze-like "tumors" that imply wounds, recuperation, and closure.
Residencies in Iceland in 2000 and 2003 took Cooper's work in a new direction, as she explored the fluid dynamics of geological forces such as lava flows and earthquakes. Surge (2002) is a fibrous, arched form that suggests vast, horizontal volcanic and glacial landscapes and the parallel forms of recorded injuries and change on bark.Walker, Hollis. "Nature's subtle gifts," Journal North (Santa Fe), July 2002. For Fall (2004), she translated a drawing into three dimensions, creating a seven-foot wood veneer wall sculpture whose free-form undulations spill another six feet onto the floor. That work led to a series of multi-sectioned sculptures cast in iron from clay slabs, in which she varied organic, terrain-like surfaces with smooth cut edges to suggest landscape tensions between nature and human development. The largest, Trace (2006), is a ten-foot work whose nine sections resemble slices of earth strata forced together, domino-like, by great pressure. In later sculpture, such as in the 2019 show, "Increment" (Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art), Cooper explored layered transformation, the intersection between natural and manufactured, and form as a record of development, repurposing veneer scraps and earlier sculpture fragments, often in intimate, highly tactile, smaller works.Kochman, Adrienne. Increment, Chicago: Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art, 2019.
Drawings