Nancy M. Cohen is an American visual artist.Woodford, Alix. "Nancy Cohen Returns to MacDowell," Art New England, November/December 2023. Her art often defies categorization, merging forms such as drawing, tapestry, sculpture and installation, and moving between abstraction and reference to the body and natural environment.Nahas, Dominique. "Nancy Cohen at Noyes Museum," Sculpture, September 2008.Selekman, Rachel. "Nancy Cohen, Kouros Gallery," New Art Examiner, October 1998.Goodman, Jonathan. "Nancy Cohen," Sculpture, April 2016. She typically works with handmade paper and glass and repurposed objects, materials that underscore qualities such as fragility, liminality, transparency, tactility and provisionality.Martin, Jordana Munk. "Paper Tapestries: The Marsh Drawings of Nancy Cohen," Hand Papermaking, Summer 2017.Naves, Mario. "Nancy Cohen: The State We're In," New York Sun, April 5, 2024.Cleveland, David. "Nancy Cohen at Kouros Gallery," ARTnews, November 2004. Since 2007, she has focused on abstracted interpretations of water ecologies affected by human development.Koplos, Janet. "Nancy Cohen: Incorporating," Nancy Cohen: Permeable Matter, Union, NJ: Kean University, 2010.Boyle, Katherine. "Textile Museum Goes Green with New Exhibition," The Washington Post, April 22, 2011. Retrieved March 3, 2024.Dodd, Kate. "Nancy Cohen: Force: Observations from the Interior," Delicious Line, October 2019. Retrieved March 3, 2024. This work balances celebration and critique, finding beauty amid destruction as it conveys the dissonance between the constancy of nature and a virulent built environment.Swartz, Anne. "Geopolitics and the Beautiful," in Nancy Cohen: Hackensack Dreaming, Midori Yoshimoto, et al., Jersey City, NJ: New Jersey City University Galleries, 2015. Sculpture critic Jonathan Goodman writes, Cohen's "forms—drawings of glass and wire— offer spectacular visions of what art can be when taken from the ruins of nature. There is a vulnerability to [her] work that moves it from the descriptive to a lyrical consideration of loss, though survival always remains a possibility."
Cohen has been awarded fellowships, grants and residencies from organizations including the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, Brodsky Center, Corning Museum of Glass and MacDowell.Jersey City Arts Council. "Announcing the 2024 Individual Artist Fellowship Recipients," April 30, 2024. Retrieved March 3, 2024.Aronoff, Amy. "Nancy Cohen and Alonzo Davis Receive 2022 Murray Reich Distinguished Artist Awards,", New York Foundation for the Arts, November 22, 2022. Retrieved October 22, 2024.Rutgers University. "Mary H. Dana Women Artists Series Records," Retrieved March 3, 2024.Corning Museum of Glass. Nancy Cohen, Artist-in-Residence, Artists. Retrieved March 3, 2024. Her work belongs to the collections of institutions including the Asheville Art Museum,Asheville Art Museum. "Virtual In Conversation: Nancy Cohen." Retrieved October 22, 2024. Bergstrom-Mahler Museum of Glass,Bergstrom-Mahler Museum of Glass. Past Exhibits. Retrieved March 3, 2024. Memphis Brooks Museum of Art,Memphis Brooks Museum of Art. Paired Drawing, Nancy Cohen, Objects.. Retrieved October 22, 2024. and Montclair Art Museum.Fisher, Catherine. "Alumna Nancy Cohen '84 Featured in Solo Show," Columbia University School of the Arts, March 9, 2022. Retrieved March 3, 2024. She has exhibited at those museums as well as at the SculptureCenter, The Textile Museum and Newark Museum of Art, among other venues.McCall, Trish. "Montclair Art Museum’s 'New Directions in Fiber Art' full of daring and imagination," NJ Arts, March 1, 2019. Retrieved March 3, 2024.Yaniv, Etty. "Artists on Coping: Nancy Cohen," Art Spiel, May 28, 2020. Retrieved March 3, 2024.
Cohen is based in Jersey City, New Jersey.Dieu Donne Nancy Cohen, Residents. Retrieved March 3, 2024.
Life and career Cohen was born in Queens, New York and grew up along Long Island Sound.Kaulesssar, Ricardo. "Jersey City Artist Tussles with Wrathful, Ravaging Forces Tied to the Climate Crisis," North Jersey.com, September 26, 2022. Retrieved March 3, 2024. Her lifelong experience on the periphery of water in New York and industrial New Jersey has been a key inspiration in her work. By high school, she developed an interest in art and apprenticed with ceramic artist and painter Marylyn Dintenfass.Murphy, Kelly A. and Janet Koplos. Nancy Cohen: Permeable Matter, Union, NJ: Kean University, 2010. She majored in ceramics at the Rochester Institute of Technology (BFA, 1981), eventually turning her focus to sculpture at Columbia University. After earning an MFA there in 1984, she studied with sculptor Barbara Zucker at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. After graduating, Cohen taught at the National Academy of Design, Parsons School of Design and Pratt Institute, and later, at Queens College from 2004 until her retirement in 2023.
Cohen's early sculptures and wall assemblages consisted of found objects blended with mixed materials that reviews described as fleshy and visceral.Raynor, Vivien. "Group Show With 'Side Dish'," The New York Times, November 6, 1988. Retrieved March 3, 2024.Raynor, Vivien. "Sculptures that Test the Idea of Opposites," The New York Times, October 1, 1989. Retrieved March 3, 2024.Raynor, Vivien. "Some of the Best Works Turn Out to Be Three-Dimensional," The New York Times, April 18, 1993. Retrieved March 3, 2024. She exhibited this work in group shows at the alternative spaces Art in General, A.I.R. Gallery and White Columns and at the Jersey City Museum between 1986 and 1994.Raynor, Vivien. "'Intimations' of Figures at Robeson Center Gallery," The New York Times, October 12, 1986. Retrieved March 3, 2024.Cotter, Holland. "In New Jersey, a Permanent Japonisme Display," The New York Times, July 8, 1994. Retrieved March 3, 2024. During this period, she also produced larger works and outdoor installations, for venues such as the Socrates Sculpture Park, after learning welding through a Pollock-Krasner grant.Kimmelman, Michael. "Outdoor Sculpture in Review," The New York Times, August 6, 1993. Retrieved March 3, 2024. Following a 1992 residency at Dieu Donné, she turned to papermaking, a medium notable for its malleability and translucence. She received broader critical attention for this work, through reviews of solo exhibitions at Kouros Gallery (1998, 2004) and Snug Harbor (1996), among others.Johnson, Ken. "Nancy Cohen," The New York Times, July 10, 1998. Retrieved March 3, 2024.Raven, Arlene. "New York Story," Sculpture, January 1996.Cotter, Holland. "Sculpture that Basks in Summer," The New York Times, August 9, 1996. Retrieved March 3, 2024.
In the 2000s, Cohen has had solo shows and installations at the Noyes Museum, Katonah Museum of Art, UrbanGlass, Bergstrom-Mahler Museum of Glass, and Accola Griefen and Kathryn Markel galleries in New York, among others.Crawford, Elizabeth. "Between Seeing & Knowing, A. Boothe & N. Cohen," NY Arts Magazine, September 2013. She appeared in surveys of paper and fiber art at institutions including the Milwaukee Art Museum, The Textile Museum and CODA Museum (Netherlands), and of glass work at the Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft and Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park.New Jersey City University Galleries. Nancy Cohen: Hackensack Dreaming, Midori Yoshimoto, et al., Jersey City, NJ: New Jersey City University Galleries, 2015. She has also produced a number of collaborative projects, with artists, papermakers and environmentalists.Yaniv, Etty. "Nancy Cohen – One Substance from the Start," Art Spiel, October 9, 2018. Retrieved March 3, 2024.Fishman, Susan Hoffman. "On the Enduring Beauty, Power and Fragility of Water," Artists & Climate Change, June 4, 2019. Retrieved March 3, 2024. Among them are several with Anna Boothe, including the glass installation Between Seeing and Knowing (2013/2017), and Sensation: Interior View (2006), a sculptural collaboration with molecular biologist Shirley Tilghman.
Work and reception Critics identify sensations of transition and transformation as central to Cohen's work.Scanlan, Jennifer. "Sheltering In Place: The Geography of Memory," in Nancy Cohen: Atlas of Permanence, Summit, NJ: Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, 2021. These qualities are a product of her experimentation with materials (translucent paper, glass, wire) and forms that foster tensions between frailty and resilience, transparency and opacity, interior and exterior, the organic and architectonic, the arbitrary and planned, and gravity, weight and balance. Curator Mary Birmingham notes, Cohen's "materials physically embody the same qualities she finds in nature and people—fragility and strength. She has worked with glass and handmade paper, attracted by their translucency and ability to be structure and surface simultaneously. There is an inherent tension in their potential breakability that makes them effective metaphors for both the fragile ecosystem and the aging body."Birmingham, Mary. "The Work of Time," in Nancy Cohen: Atlas of Permanence, Summit, NJ: Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, 2021. Cohen has been influenced by sculptors including Louise Bourgeois, Alberto Giacometti and Nancy Graves.
Sculpture and public art, 1990–2004 Cohen's work in the 1990s featured abstract, organic forms made of steel, cloth, adobe, rope, wood, wax and found objects that suggested pods or cellular configurations.Sapers, Jonathan. "Goings On About Town," The New Yorker, July 13, 1992. Her outdoor installation, A Community of Shelter (Thomas Paine Park, 1992) consisted of six low, sculptures supported by steel armatures tied to trees.Raven, Arlene. "The Great Outdoors," The Village Voice, August 4, 1992. New York Times critic Michael Kimmelman compared them to the abstractions of Martin Puryear or Richard Deacon and natural forms of shelter, adding that their evocative shapes "sympathetically and obliquely referred to the homeless and their ingenuity in creating makeshift places to sleep."Kimmelman, Michael. "Sculpture, Sculpture Everywhere," The New York Times, July 31, 1992. Retrieved March 3, 2024. For Only Connect (Snug Harbor, 1998), a public installation in a botanical garden greenhouse, Cohen suspended "cocoons" of translucent Abacá paper stretched over foliage-filled branches, garden implements and steel that suggested ghostly but aggressive outgrowths of the hothouse plants below.
In exhibitions at Kouros Gallery (1998, 2004), Cohen presented enigmatic found-object and assemblage works (e.g., Gurney, 2002). The earlier show evoked feminine themes, using domestic items (silverware, kitchen utensils, broken glassware) that were partially concealed by taut Abacá ovals evoking protective sheaths and wombs (e.g., Distention, 1998).Shales, Ezra. "Wild," Review, February 15, 1998. New Art Examiner reviewer Rachel Selekman observed "strength of form and fragility of means imbue Cohen's sculpture with a presence of gritty elegance that breathes with life." The scavenged-object sculptures in the latter show were compared to biomorphic combinations encountered along an urban beach offering "a tenuous balance of whimsy and thoughtfulness."
Works on paper, sculpture and installations, 2005–present