Nancy Cohen
Nancy Cohen
Workspace Program Resident 1992
When working in handmade paper, I can appear to defy gravity, incorporate light and exploit extreme imbalances in weight. All of this allows me to make literal the delicate, tenuous, ephemeral balance we all maintain. Working with handmade paper provides an implication of the body in the work—its touch and tenderness, its frailty and endurance. —Nancy Cohen, 1992
Nancy Cohen’s first experience working with paper was as a participant in the Workspace Program in 1993. As a sculptor, Cohen was drawn to the medium for both its fragility and strength, qualities which she also admires in clay and glass. Cohen has since incorporated hand papermaking regularly into her work, making paper a primary material for drawing, sculpture and installations.
During her Work Space residency, Cohen collaborated with Paul Wong to create cotton drawings with embedded objects in relief, as well as free-standing and wall-based sculptures. She stretched laminated overbeaten abaca over steel and wooden armatures to create translucent cage-like forms over the frames. Interested in the way paper acted as a skin both technically and metaphorically, Cohen was drawn to making work that walked the line between drawing and sculpture, merging both in these works.
Cohen became especially interested in working with abaca and began using it as a covering for under structures of intimate assemblages that were primarily personal, domestic and feminine (i.e. wine glasses, kitchen utensils, perfume bottles, beads). Their colors and hidden surfaces were both obscured and revealed through the transparent abaca. Cohen’s enigmatic and abstract sculptures were meant to evoke a range of feelings, through references to human forms, experiences and relationships.
In the Studio
About the Artist
Nancy Cohen (b. Queens, NY) is a Jersey City-based artist who examines resiliency in relation to the environment and human body. Cohen received her MFA from Columbia University and BFA from Rochester Institute of Technology, and has studied at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She has been an artist-in-residence at the Tides Institute and Museum of Art, Ninth Wave Global, Bullseye Glass, Pilchuck Glass School, Dieu Donné, Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and The Archie Bray Foundation, among others. Awards include fellowships from the NJ State Council on the Arts, the Rutgers Center for Innovative Print and Paper, and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and multiple fellowships in Sculpture and Works on Paper from the NJ State Council of the Arts.
In 2021, she will have a residency at Women’s Studio Workshop and a solo exhibition of large-scale paper works at The Visual Arts Center of NJ. Past solo exhibitions include Kathryn Markel Gallery (2019, 2017), and Accola Griefen Gallery (2013) in NYC. Group exhibitions include WAKE at Dorsky Gallery Curatorial Programs in Long Island City, BioBAT, and Mike Childs &Nancy Cohen: A Quiet Place at Robert Henry Contemporary in Brooklyn. Recent projects include installations in Karmiel, Israel; the CODA Museum in Holland; the Katonah Museum of Art in NY and a collaboration with environmentalists based on the Mullica River for the Noyes Museum of Art in NJ.
Cohen’s work is in the permanent collections of the NJ State Museum, Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Museum, Montclair Art Museum, & Yale University Art Museum, among many others. Cohen’s work has been reviewed in books and periodicals, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Village Voice, ArtNews, and Sculpture Magazine, among many others. (Source: Accola Griefen Fine Art and VanDeb Editions)
For more information, please visit their website: http://www.nancymcohen.com/