Born in Manhattan in 1943, Cora Cohen received B.A. and M.A. degrees from Bennington College. She had her first important exhibition of abstract paintings at the Everson Museum of Art in 1974.
In the 1990s, Cohen became increasingly interested in the notion of painting informed by a world outside of self-reflexive concerns with modernism and postmodernism. She used photography to record slices of life in urban environments, began working on exposed X-ray films, and made paintings that affirmed the medium’s capacity to extend beyond the confines of a rectilinear format. Cohen’s later works were based on seemingly contradictory ways of seeing and painting. Mark-making as figuration was followed by acts of erasure. Works came into being through the oscillation of emerging form and its dissolution. Discernible imagery gave way to uncertainty, waywardness, and displacement.
In addition to the Guggenheim Fellowship, Cohen’s honors include grants from the NEA (1987); the New York State Foundation for the Arts (1989); the Gottlieb Foundation (1990, 2006); a Yaddo Foundation Residency; The Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation Space Program Residency, Brooklyn, New York (2008–2009); and The Edward F. Albee Foundation Residency, Montauk, New York (2009).
