Recognition: Long Island City

After moving into a new studio in Long Island City in 2009, the decade brought Cora Cohen’s career its most concentrated institutional recognition: an Academy purchase award in 2012, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2013, and election to the National Academy of Design in 2016. Alongside it, the late bodies of her work consolidated into the Drawings, Curtains, Tablets, and Meanders. These categories are useful precisely because they do not become styles—they are ways of grouping different kinds of work that emerge from shared procedures. The practice does not stabilize; recognition and indeterminacy coexist.

From “A Personal History”
by Cora Cohen

“It’s said that in Eastern art, the viewer has to go into the painting. And while I’m not an Eastern artist, I do try to make art that offers a space in which to roam around and maybe even get lost. Many of my paintings don’t have a lot of obvious drama, but if you become involved in them, they may. I’ve also long been interested in our daily sensory visual experience, and how we convert the uncertainties of first sight into coherent, generalized views that make sense of the world. I attempt to affirm the disjuncture inherent in that moment when things are first glimpsed, before an image coheres.^1”

“In many of the paintings of the 2000s, I initiated intensely purposeful lines and shapes on a background of very beautiful, lush skeins and pours of paint. I then deliberately and messily erased them. The resulting palimpsest became the final work. Many of the drawn and painted lines and shapes were derived from projecting earlier paintings of my own, and those of others I admire, onto the pours I had made. I then traced their outlines with charcoal and paint. My intent was to foreground an oscillation between uncertainty and surety, fastness and slowness, to make them the form and substance of the finished work. A history of my discards and overrides remained visible. An image emerged not unlike multiple exposures on a single plate of film.”

“In 2009, I moved into a new studio in Long Island City, and by the 2010s I was grouping my paintings into separate categories that included Drawings, Curtains, and Tablets. Curtains generally referred to hiding and revealing, relying on the sense of “behind” and “in front of,” nodding to my longtime interest in art expressing the underside of life. [Curtain, 2008, was subsequently part of the Exhibition of Work by Newly Elected Members and Recipients of Honors and Awards in 2012 by the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York). Drawings were so-called because someone once said that I wasn’t really making paintings, that my paintings were really big drawings.”

“The Tablets paintings were based on the story behind the deciphering of the Minoan Linear B script and some of the elements of script itself: its syllabary, logograms, and pictograms. These were done on paper and linen with water-based paint, raw pigment (evoking clay tablets and archaeological excavation), and, at times, oil. During their making, meaning was displaced by a shift to immaterial information, meant to parallel the attempts at the actual deciphering of Linear B script. All these paintings continued to develop out of acts and erasures, with a new image constructed through form and its displacement.”

“Then, in the fall of 2014, I shifted my practice toward an emphasis on what might be considered conventionally beautiful color. The following year, I began a series of Meanders, largely on paper but with a few paintings as well.”

RELATED DOCUMENTS

Rob Colvin, “Cora Cohen,” Artists’ Painters: Cora Cohen— Paintings, Altered X- Rays, Drawings”, exh. cat., 4–5. Düren: Leopold- Hoesch- Museum, 2016

David Rhodes, “Dirty/Clean Painting: Cora Cohen at Guided by Invoices”, artcritical.com, March 6, 2013

William Eckhardt Kohler, “Cora Cohen - Divine Madness,” The Huffington Post, March 2013

Nora Griffin, “CORA COHEN The Responsibility of Forms,” The Brooklyn Rail, March 2013

Mitchell Ed Mittelstedt, “Cora Cohen’s Writerly Art,” F Newsmagazine, November 2011

MILESTONES

2011: Works on Paper, d.m. allison, Houston, Texas,

2012: Purchase Award (Curtain), American Academy of Arts & Letters

2013: Guggenheim Fellowship

2016: Election to the Academy of Design

2016: Bridge Freezes Before the Road: Drawings (“Meanders” exhibition), New York Studio School Gallery, New York, New York