Cora Cohen Trust

Timeline

1943

Cora Cohen is born in New York City on October 19.

Her family values art and culture, and their idea of modern art is abstraction: Braque, Picasso, Miró, Mondrian, and I. Rice Pereira are some of the artists she looks at growing up, along with the American modernists.

In her Personal History, she also reports that, as a child, she liked to play on the street, and make messes or concoct things with materials, for no reason or purpose.

Blurry picture of Cora Cohen as a young child in front of an easel, with brush

Childhood snapshot of Cora in front of easel, with brush.

1957–60

Cohen attends the High School of Music & Art in Manhattan.

She is introduced to artists like Käthe Kollwitz, Max Beckmann, Georges Rouault, Édouard Vuillard, along with contemporary art.

1960–64

She enrolls at Bennington College, Vermont, studying painting with Paul Feeley and art criticism with Lawrence Alloway and Clement Greenberg.

Welded steel, both expressive and formal, (as in the work of David Smith or Anthony Caro), prevails in sculpture. From Tony Smith, she learns about architectural notions, and the idea that there could be such a thing as a world view. The resolutely American New England-ness of the region, and the introduction of industrial materials and methods with which to make art, help reorganize her ideas.

Her earliest surviving paintings, the Orange Series of 1963, use flat color and sinuous contours that remain close to Feeley’s “soft hard-edge” manner. Their shifting relationship between bounded shape and surrounding field introduces questions about figure and ground that will recur throughout Cohen’s work.

1969–70

Cohen is Artist in Residence in Painting at the University of Pennsylvania.

1970–72

She returns to Bennington College as a graduate student, studying with Richard Haas.

During these years she meets the sound artist Liz Phillips, who introduces her to new music, in particular the work of Pauline Oliveros and Steve Reich. Cohen finds in this music reinforcement for using traditional materials toward decompositional abstraction.

1972

Cohen completes her master’s degree, holds her first solo exhibition at Bennington College, and moves into the top floor of the cast-iron building at 287 Broadway in Lower Manhattan.

The nineteenth-century building stands at the corner of Broadway and Reade Street, in a downtown neighborhood then dense with artists living and working in converted lofts. Cohen’s top-floor space, with three exposures and what she recalled as often glorious light, becomes her home and studio for the next thirty-five years. It is also the setting for the long-table studio dinners her friends would remember for decades.

Almost none of Cohen’s paintings from the early 1970s survive. She later described them as works one might pass without recognizing as paintings—something almost like air—and connected them directly to the cosmological cast of her late work. The idea that a painting might approach the condition of atmosphere was present from the beginning.

Black-and-white photo of Cora Cohen in a white tank top and dark pants posing by a radiator, with a textured wall panel and open doorway behind her.

Undated early photograph of Cora Cohen in her Reade Street loft.

1974

Cohen's first professional exhibition, initiated by James Harithas, opens at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, New York.

Cohen’s first professional exhibition is also her museum debut—a two-person show with Forrest Bess initiated by curator and museum director James Harithas. It places her work in dialogue with an older, self-taught artist whose small-scale, symbolic abstractions operated outside the mainstream art world. Pairing Cohen with Bess, a visionary painter championed by Betty Parsons, marks an unusual beginning for a painter two years out of school. Substantial regional press establishes a public record for her practice.

Invitation announcing an art exhibition opening, with event details for Friday, November 8, 5–7 p.m., and RSVP information.

Everson Museum exhibition opening invitation.

1976

In New York, Cohen begins exhibiting in New York at the Max Hutchinson Gallery in SoHo.1

Joining Max Hutchinson Gallery gives Cohen a New York presence as SoHo becomes the center of the city’s art world. That year she also exhibits with Susan Fortgang at the Soho Center for Visual Artists and is included in New Talent at the Aldrich Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut—reviewed in the New York Times—and Contemporary Painting at Rutgers University in Camden, New Jersey.

  1. 1 Richard Lorber, “Reviews,” Arts Magazine 50, no. 3, March 1976.
    John Canaday, “It's Spring in Connecticut, and New Talent Blooms,” New York Times, May 9, 1976.

1977

Cohen has a solo exhibition at the State University of New York at Oneonta.

1978

Cohen participates in Artists’ Mobilization for Survival at Plaza Art Gallery, New York, and Pattern Painting at P.S. 1, Long Island City.

Artists’ Mobilization for Survival was part of a broader cultural response to the nuclear arms race and Cold War tensions. Opened in 1976, P.S. 1 was quickly becoming an important venue for contemporary art. Cohen’s inclusion there in Pattern Painting is particularly notable. Her participation in one politically charged exhibition and another focused on an emerging formal concern demonstrates the breadth of her engagement with New York’s art scene.

1979

Cohen has a solo exhibition at Max Hutchinson

Gallery and is included in New Options in Painterly Abstraction at the Cadman Plaza East Courthouse in Brooklyn.2

Accompanied by a twenty-four-page catalogue by painter Michael Phillips, New Options in Painterly Abstraction argues for painterly abstraction after a decade in which its exhaustion had repeatedly been declared. Cohen enters that argument without returning to the terms that governed abstract painting earlier in the century. By the decade’s close she has begun the Portraits of Women, abstract canvases including Sacagawea, after the Lemhi Shoshone woman who accompanied the Lewis and Clark expedition, and Ruby, after the song sung by Ray Charles. The names do not turn the paintings into illustrations; they bring histories and associations into paintings whose abstractness had been expected to exclude them.

  1. 2 Michael Phillips, New Options in Painterly Abstraction, exh. cat. (Brooklyn: Cadman Plaza East Courthouse, 1979).
    Peter Frank,“ Reviews,” The Village Voice, June 4, 1979.

Cora Cohen in a rocking chair before a large framed canvas facing a wall

Cora Cohen in her studio, 1990s

1980

Solo exhibition at Max Hutchinson Gallery, New York.

1981

Solo exhibition at Dunne/Steen Fine Arts, Greenwich, Connecticut, with reviews in ARTnews and Art World.

1982

Cohen receives a Yaddo Foundation residency.

1982

Cohen’s work is included in Abstract Substance and Meaning: Painting by Women Artists at the College Art Association Conference in New York.

Discussed in the Women's Art Journal and The Village Voice, the exhibition places Cohen within a reconsideration of women's position in contemporary abstract painting.3

  1. 3 Kay Kenny, “Abstract Substance and Meaning,” Women's Art Journal 3, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 1982)
    Carrie Rickey, “Why Women Don't Express Themselves,” The Village Voice, November 2, 1982.

1983

Solo exhibition at Fairleigh Dickinson University, Madison, New Jersey.

Invitation, Fairleigh Dickinson Exhibition, 1983

Invitation, Fairleigh Dickinson Exhibition, 1983

1984

Cohen exhibits the Portraits of Women at Max Hutchinson Gallery, and meets Joan Mitchell.4

In the New York Times, Michael Brenson calls the thickly painted oils “dense, brooding and yet elated,” describing a recognizable female form dancing through an untamed world that has become the figure's element. The exhibition is also reviewed in ARTnews, Arts Magazine, and Flash Art. Cohen's friendship with Mitchell brings her repeatedly into the older painter's circle at Vétheuil, outside Paris, and close to a painter whose independence from prevailing orthodoxies sustained her practice. It also situates Cohen's dense, gestural painting in the Abstract Expressionist lineage, risking identification with a genealogy from which it had departed.

  1. 4 Michael Brenson, “Cora Cohen at Max Hutchinson,” New York Times, March 16, 1984.

1985

Klaus Kertess selects Cohen for Painting as Landscape: Views of American Modernism.5

Traveling from the Baxter Art Gallery in Pasadena to the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, the exhibition places Cohen within a genealogy of American modernist painting being reconsidered by younger painters and critics.

  1. 5 Klaus Kertess, Painting as Landscape, exh. cat. (Pasadena: Baxter Art Gallery, 1985); traveled to the Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, 1985.

1986

Cohen's interview with Joan Mitchell appears in BOMB.6

Part of a broader engagement that also produces conversations with Ralph Humphrey, Dona Nelson, and others, the interview presents Cohen as both a painter under discussion and participant in the conversation around American painting and its histories.

  1. 6 Cora Cohen and Betsy Sussler, “Joan Mitchell” (interview), BOMB, no. 17, Fall 1986.

1987

Cohen receives a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, shows at the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and joins Art Against AIDS at Dia.7

Her paintings appear in the Invitational Exhibition of Visual Arts at the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in New York. Robert Rosenblum's Art Against AIDS at Dia is an early institutional response to the crisis transforming New York's art world.

  1. 7 Art Against AIDS, curated by Robert Rosenblum, Dia Art Foundation, New York, June 4–July 4, 1987.

1988

Cohen is included in In Her Own Voice, curated by Saul Ostrow at McNeil Gallery, Philadelphia.

The exhibition extends Ostrow's 1987 BOMB project, “In Her Own Voice,” in which women artists answered questions about gender and painting directly rather than having their positions interpreted. Cohen joins a conversation considering women artists in relation to painting's histories and conditions.

1988

Solo exhibition at Wolff Gallery, New York.

Group exhibitions the same year include Aspects of Abstraction at Holly Solomon Gallery, reviewed by Brenson in the New York Times, and Six Abstract Painters at Pennine Hart Gallery.8

  1. 8 Michael Brenson, “Aspects of Abstraction,” The New York Times, January 22, 1988.

Invitation: Wolff Gallery, December 1988

Invitation: Wolff Gallery, December 1988

1989

The Wolff Gallery exhibition is reviewed in Art in America and Arts Magazine.9

Stephen Westfall and Marjorie Welish write the reviews. This critical attention establishes Cohen as a painter resisting the stylistic terms through which painting is recast in the 1980s. In the later works, thick impasto meets thin, stained, atmospheric grounds. In 3085-7 (Untitled 1987) (Can-Can Dancer), a gnarled knot of oil floats like a painterly asteroid. The tension is between material behaviors: what is built up, what remains dispersed, what seems controlled, and what takes its own course. Must materials submit to the artist's will at all?

  1. 9 Stephen Westfall, “Cora Cohen at Jamie Wolff,” Art in America 77, no. 6 (June 1989)
    Marjorie Welish, “Cora Cohen,” Arts Magazine 63, no. 7 (March 1989).

1990

Solo exhibition at Holly Solomon Gallery
Cohen receives her first Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation grant (her second comes in 2006).

1991

Cohen is included in Strategies for the Next Painting in New York and Chicago.10

Organized by Saul Ostrow, the exhibition brings together painters reconsidering what abstraction might become after the exhaustion of its established narratives. Cohen appears alongside Gerhard Richter, Robert Mangold, Brice Marden, Jonathan Lasker, Gail Fitzgerald, and others. The catalogue includes Ostrow's essay, “The Image of Gesture: Strategies for the Next Painting.”

  1. 10 Saul Ostrow, curator, Strategies for the Next Painting, Wolff Gallery, New York, and Feigen Gallery, Chicago, 1991.
    Saul Ostrow, “Strategies for a New Abstraction,” Tema Celeste, no. 32–33 , Autumn 1991.

Blue book cover with centered white text reading “STRATEGIES FOR THE LAST PAINTING,” conveying a minimalist, contemplative tone.

Front cover, Strategies for the Last Painting catalog

1991–92

Cohen works periodically in Chicago as a visiting artist in the Department of Painting and Drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago while continuing to work in New York. There, she begins painting on her studio drop cloths.11

Because the Chicago studio floor had to remain clean, Cohen packed the paint-marked drop cloths at the end of her stay and shipped them to New York. Trampled, stained, and folded, they carried graphite, copper, marble dust, aluminum, iron oxide, scraps, and other studio debris. Pours and chemical processes, including oxidized copper, produce contrasts between luminosity and dullness. The residue of making becomes both support and part of the painting.

  1. 11 Cora Cohen, “A Personal History,” Cora Cohen (Gregory R. Miller & Co., 2026).

1992

Cohen has a two-person exhibition with Anne Deleporte at A/C Project Room, where she also curates An Esemplastic Shift.
She is included in Contemporary Surfaces, curated by Rick Ward at Pamela Auchincloss Gallery, New York.

The title An Esemplastic Shift invokes Coleridge's term for bringing disparate elements together. Holland Cotter12 reviews Contemporary Surfaces in the New York Times, which brings together artists concerned with material process, surface, and the status of the picture plane.

  1. 12 Holland Cotter, “Art in Review: Contemporary Surfaces,” The New York Times, August 1992.

Casual photograph of Cora Cohen in profile. Undated

Cora Cohen, undated photograph (2000s)

1992

Cohen participates in “Where Meaning Begins,” a panel discussion published in the April–May special issue of Tema Celeste devoted to abstraction.

Edited by Demetrio Paparoni, the issue includes artists and critics such as Mira Schor, Deborah Kass, Jan Avgikos, Faye Hirsch, Patricia Collins, Nancy Spector, and Lois Nesbitt. Cohen describes herself as “becoming increasingly interested in the notion of painting informed by a world outside of self-reflexive concerns with modernism and postmodernism.”

1993

Cohen has her first solo exhibition at Jason McCoy Inc., New York.
She is also included in Libidinal Painting, curated by Bill Arning at White Columns.13

The exhibition begins a decade-long relationship with Jason McCoy Inc., where Cohen has solo exhibitions in 1993, 1994, 1997, 2001, and 2004. Reviews of the 1993 show appear in the New York Times by Holland Cotter and in Art in America by Lilly Wei, with additional notices in ARTnews and The New Yorker.

  1. 13 Holland Cotter, “Art in Review: Cora Cohen at Jason McCoy Gallery,” New York Times, March 19, 1993.
    Lilly Wei, “Cora Cohen at Jason McCoy,” Art in America 81, no. 6 (June 1993).

1990–95

Cohen begins the Altered X-Rays in response to the AIDS crisis.14

The earliest X-rays, obtained from Cohen's internist, an infectious-disease specialist, were of men who had died of AIDS. The series emerges from her anger at the government's failure to take the epidemic seriously. Cohen effaces, dissolves, or burns portions of the film; elsewhere, pigment, metallic powders, mica, wax, and polyurethane interrupt its slick, translucent surface. She described the works as “elegies for the dead” and laments for the loss of human touch. The transformations press on the distance between the medical image and the material body, between what the X-ray records and what can still be touched or altered. Hung away from the wall so that light passes through the film, they incorporate translucency, shadow, and the surrounding space.

  1. 14 Cora Cohen, “Altered X-Rays,” 2015.
    Sidra Stich, “Paintings and Altered X Rays (1983-1996),” 1996.
    Carlo McCormick, “Forever Altered,” Cora Cohen (2026).

Cora Cohen at an exhibition of her Altered X-Rays in Germany, 2011

Cora Cohen at an exhibition of her Altered X-Rays in Germany, 2011

1994

Cohen has a solo exhibition at Jason McCoy Inc., accompanied by a catalogue essay by Linda Nochlin.
A solo exhibition of works on paper is held at David Beitzel Gallery.15

Nochlin argues that Cohen, like Joan Mitchell and Joan Snyder, belongs to her historical generation rather than to an essentialist category of “feminine” painting. Mark Stevens reviews the McCoy exhibition in New York Magazine under the headline “Bravura Brushwork,” while Faye Hirsch reviews the works on paper at David Beitzel Gallery in Art in America. The exhibitions demonstrate Cohen's expanding work across media.

  1. 15 Linda Nochlin, “Cora Cohen: Recent Paintings,” exh. cat. (New York: Jason McCoy Gallery, 1994).
    Mark Stevens, “Bravura Brushwork,” New York Magazine, November 28, 1994.

Invitation: Cora Cohen Works on Paper, David Beitzel, 1994

Invitation: Cora Cohen Works on Paper, David Beitzel, 1994

1994

Cohen is included in Heterogeneity, Abstraction and Virtual Space at Out of the Blue Gallery in Edinburgh.
She serves as a visiting artist at the Art Institute of Chicago and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, through 1995.

Curated by Leonard Bullock, the Edinburgh exhibition includes Paul Bloodgood, Suzanne McClelland, Dona Nelson, Jack Whitten, and others. It introduces Cohen's work in a European context before she begins working in Cologne in 1996. Her European exhibition activity subsequently concentrates in Germany, culminating in Paintings and Altered X-Rays in Cologne in 1999.

1995

Cohen completes her second residency at Yaddo, after her first in 1982.

1996

A mid-career museum survey opens at the University of Alabama, and Cohen rents a studio in Cologne.
She is included in After the Fall: Aspects of Abstract Painting Since 1970, curated by Lilly Wei at the Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art
She also serves as a visiting artist at the University of Minnesota and Kunsthögskolan in Stockholm.16

Cora Cohen: Paintings and Altered X-Rays 1983–1996, organized by the Sarah Moody Gallery of Art at the University of Alabama and traveling to the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, gathers work demonstrating the widening range of Cohen's practice.

That year, Cohen rents a studio in Cologne and begins using the city as a base for extended viewing and working in Europe. Without a permanent painting studio, she focuses on paper and vellum. From 1996 onward, she divides her time between New York and Cologne, which she regards as a second home. Her drawings register the topographies of both cities. #10-98 New York/Köln, for example, maps her bicycle commute around Cologne's old Roman ring over an erased drawing of New York's grid. The cities are not simply depicted; their structures become conditions of the work.

Cologne also brings Cohen closer to European painting traditions distinct from postwar American abstraction. Polke and Richter are important to her because their practices allow elements historically separated within painting to remain in relation.

  1. 16 Sidra Stich, “Paintings and Altered X-Rays 1983–1996,” Sarah Moody Gallery of Art, Tuscaloosa, April 5–May 3, 1996; Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, August 31–October 13, 1996.

“Cora Cohen: Paintings and Altered X-Rays 1983–1996” exhibition catalog.

1996

Cohen exhibits in group shows at Stefanie Hering at Auto Kaiser and Galerie Brigitte Schenk in Cologne, Galerie Mariann Ahnlund in Umeå, Sweden, and Hering Raum in Bonn.

These exhibitions expand Cohen's professional network and critical reception in Europe. The Umeå exhibition establishes a Scandinavian connection that later results in acquisitions by the Swedish State Art Council, while the exhibition at Hering Raum leads to solo presentations in 1997 and 1998.

A closeup of Cora in "13 Artists in the Studio," a PBS video series from 1996

Frame from “13 Artists in the Studio: Cora Cohen,” a public broadcasting video series.

1997

Cohen has solo exhibitions at Jason McCoy and at the Hering Raum Bonn in Germany.

Her exhibition at Jason McCoy is reviewed in Art in America, Art News, Art Net, The New Republic, TimeOut New York, Review, The New York Times, The New Yorker and New York Magazine.17

She is also included in “Abstract Painting” at the Carrie Haddad gallery in Hudson New York, as well as in “Lilith” at the Work Space in New York; and she contributes to Artwalk, New York, a benefit event by the Coalition for the Homeless.

  1. 17 Unsigned, “Fall Preview,” New York Magazine, September 1997.

    Ken Johnson, “Galleries: 57th Street,” The New Yorker, September 1997.

    David Ebony, “David Ebony’s New York Top Ten,” artnet, September 1997.

    Unsigned, “Cora Cohen,” The New Yorker, October 1997.

    J. Bowyer Bell, “Cora Cohen Recent Paintings,” Rɘview, October 1997.

    Yvette Brackman, “Cora Cohen at Jason McCoy,” TimeOut New York, October 1997.

    Jed Perl, “Transformations,” The New Republic, December 1997.

    Sarah Schmerler, “Cora Cohen,” ARTNews, February 1998.

    Eleanor Heartney, “Cora Cohen at Jason McCoy,” Art in America, June 1998.

    John Mendelsohn, "Lilith,” The Jewish Weekly, August 1997.

    Bill Arning, “Lilith,” TimeOut New York, September 1997.

Invitation: Cora Cohen at Jason McCoy, September 1997

Invitation: “Cora Cohen,” Jason McCoy Inc., September 1997

1998

Cohen receives a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award and has solo exhibitions at Rena Bransten Gallery in San Francisco and Hering Raum in Bonn.

Invitation: Cora Cohen, Hering Raum Bonn, 1998

Invitation: “Cora Cohen,” Hering Raum Bonn, 1998

1999

Cohen participates in exhibitions at Stefanie Hering, Oppenhoff and Rädler in Leipzig; the Gerhardt Marcks Haus in Köln; the Stockholm Art Fair with Galerie Mariann Ahnlund; and Positionen 33 Painting at Hering Raum Stahlwerk Willich.

Invitation: Exhibition at Gerhard Marcks Haus

Invitation: “Cora Cohen,” Gerhard Marcks Haus, Köln.

1999

Solo exhibition at Bentley Gallery in Scottsdale
Paintings and Altered X-Rays opens in Cologne
Immediacies of the Hand: Recent Abstract Painting in New York is presented at Hunter College
Abaton Press publishes Cohen's photographs.18

The exhibition at the Bentley Gallery is the first of three; the others are in 2002 and 2005.

The Cologne exhibition is held at the Gerhard-Marcks-Haus space. The Record, the Death, the Surprise collects photographs taken in Berlin and New York; Cohen described the book as an effort to record and assimilate the unfathomable. She is also included in Immediacies of the Hand, curated by Carter Ratcliff and Kim Sobel at Hunter College's Times Square Gallery.

The simultaneous appearance of paintings, Altered X-Rays, photographs, and works on paper brings together developments from across the decade. Cohen has neither abandoned the goal of making abstraction material nor replaced painting with another medium. Instead, her work continues to contend with the elements that abstract painting had once kept apart to maintain its identity.

  1. 18 Cora Cohen, “The Record, the Death, the Surprise,” Abaton Press, Jersey City, 1999.
    Carter Ratcliff and Kim Sobel, “Immediacies of the Hand,” exh. cat., (New York: Hunter College Times Square Gallery, 1999).

Catalog: Cora Cohen at Bentley Gallery, 1999

Catalog: Cora Cohen at Bentley Gallery, Scottsdale, Arizona, January 1999

2000

Cohen reintroduces brushwork into her work, making touch materially consequential again.

At the turn of the millennium, Cohen resolves to make paintings in which touch becomes more evident. The contingency, flux, and indeterminacy developed through the X-rays, photographs, and drawings alter what painting can register. Stripping away the virtuosic, she reworks small canvases with brush and palette knife—scraping, covering, and erasing. Each mark carries the possibility of removal, and the surface records successive acts of making and unmaking that are not necessarily representational. Some paintings become, in Cohen’s account, embodiments of destructive violence harnessed by painting. The strategies and processes continue to evolve into the next decade.

2001

Solo exhibition, Paintings, at McCoy Chelsea, New York.

Invitation: Cora Cohen at Jason McCoy, March 2001

Invitation: “Cora Cohen,” Jason McCoy, Inc., March 2001

2002

Space opens at Bentley Gallery in Scottsdale.

This Bentley exhibition is the second of three solo exhibitions there (1999, 2002, 2005).

Invitation: Bentley Gallery, 2002

Invitation: “Cora Cohen,” Bentley Gallery, 2002

2004

Cora Cohen: Recent Paintings opens at Jason McCoy Inc., with Barry Schwabsky's essay “Cora Cohen: One Art.”19

Schwabsky describes Cohen’s surfaces as places where deliberate marks, chance events, slow chemical processes, and effacements coexist—including crossings-out of nothing in particular, or negations without an object. Erasure becomes another painterly action rather than the removal of an image or statement, and the surface registers its own making and unmaking. Reviews in The Brooklyn Rail and Art in America follow.

  1. 19 Barry Schwabsky, “Cora Cohen: One Art,” exh. cat. (New York: Jason McCoy Gallery, September 2004).
    Stefanie Buhmann, “Cora Cohen,” The Brooklyn Rail, November 2004.
    Steven Maine, “Cora Cohen at Jason McCoy,” Art in America, February 2005.

Invitation: Cora Cohen at Jason McCoy, September 2004

Invitation: “Cora Cohen,” Jason McCoy Inc., September 2004

2005

Solo exhibitions at Bentley Gallery, Scottsdale, and Abaton Garage, Jersey City, where Strange Fruit brings together painting, drawing, photography, and mixed media.

Strange Fruit takes its title from Billie Holiday’s song about lynching. It brings painting, drawing, photography, and mixed media together under a historical and political reference, continuing Cohen’s movement across mediums without converting that reference into political representation.20

  1. 20 Lauri Bortz, “Far Less Tangible States of Being”, Abaton Garage, Jersey City, New Jersey, 2006.

2007

Paintings and Drawings opens at Markus Winter Gallery in Berlin, with catalogue.
Oblique Forms: Spray Paint Paintings, Photographs, The Hybrid Indexical Adventure Series is presented at Abaton Garage in Jersey City.

The Berlin exhibition extends Cohen’s exhibition history in Germany from Cologne and Bonn to Berlin, bringing paintings and drawings together. At Abaton Garage, Oblique Forms unites spray-paint paintings, photographs, and the Hybrid Indexical Adventure Series, small works on synthetic paper. Together, the exhibitions make visible Cohen’s movement among mediums rather than a progression toward one.21

  1. 21 Stephen Maine, “Keeping it Real,” Abaton Garage, Jersey City, New Jersey, September 2007.

    Barbara MacAdam, “The New Abstraction”, ArtNews, April 2007.

Invitation: Markus Winter, Berlin, February 2007

Invitation: Markus Winter, Berlin, February 2007

2007–09

A vacate order forces Cohen from 287 Broadway. The Nomads begin, and she relocates to Long Island City.22

In late 2007, structural problems cause the cast-iron building at 287 Broadway to subside and tilt, prompting a city vacate order. After thirty-five years, Cohen loses the home and studio where she had lived and worked since 1972. Working in a friend’s borrowed space, she begins the Nomads, an attempt to place herself in a world in which she had lost her place. She pursues the landlord to repair the building but loses the fight. Returning to the empty loft in 2009, she tells the Tribeca Trib that all she wants is to “make the paintings I want to make.” She relocates to Long Island City, where she lives and works for the rest of her life.

  1. 22 Cora Cohen, “Nomads,” www.coracohen.com, 2015.

Cora Cohen in her studio. 29th street, NYC. August 2008

Cora Cohen in her studio. 29th street, NYC. August 2008.
Photo: Paula Gillen

2008

Come in a Little Closer opens at Michael Steinberg Fine Art
Cohen receives the Marie Walsh Sharpe studio award.23

The exhibition places Cohen’s paintings in a new context after her long association with Jason McCoy Gallery. Its ten works range in scale and surface; brushwork, scraping, pours, washes, and accumulated paint make the physical activity of painting increasingly evident. Reviews by Joan Waltemath in The Brooklyn Rail and Jennifer Riley in ArtCritical consider gesture, scale, and material procedure.

  1. 23 Cathy Nan Quinlan, “Shape Shifters: New York Painters,” artcritical.com, May 2008.

    Jennifer Riley, “Cora Cohen: Come in a Little Closer at Michael Steinberg,” artcritical.com, October 2008.

    Joan Waltemath, “Cora Cohen: Michael Steinberg Gallery,” The Brooklyn Rail, November 2008.

    Roberta Smith, “Chelsea: Art Chockablock with Encyclopedic Range,” The New York Times, November 2008.

Invitation to "Come in a Little Closer" at Michael Steinberg Fine Art

Invitation to “Come in a Little Closer” at Michael Steinberg Fine Art, 2008

2009

Cohen takes up a residency at the Edward F. Albee Foundation in Montauk.

The residency provides another temporary workplace following the loss of 287 Broadway. Cohen has relocated to Long Island City, and the legal struggle over the building has ended without her return. Home and studio no longer occupy the place they shared for thirty-five years.

2010–19

Late bodies of work consolidate around four recurring themes: Curtains, Drawings, Tablets, and Nomads.24


Across all four, forms are repeatedly made, altered, covered, and erased rather than finalized. The Curtains explore hiding and revealing, behind and in front, extending Cohen's interest in art expressing what lies beneath or behind appearances. The Drawings retain a name originating with someone's observation that Cohen's paintings were really big drawings.

The Tablets address the deciphering of the Minoan Linear B script—its syllabary, logograms, and pictograms—through water-based paint and raw pigment evoking clay and excavation. Begun after the loss of 287 Broadway, the Nomads develop from wood veneer cut in a friend's borrowed studio and shaped after Jean Prouvé's curves; his structures addressed nomadic existence. Glued to linen, the veneer forms encounter marks responding through antithetical shapes. The Nomads are made for stairwells, columns, and exterior gallery walls.

  1. 24 Mitchell Ed Mittelstedt, “Cora Cohen’s Writerly Art,” F Newsmagazine, November 2011.

Cora Cohen and Edward Albee before Curtain8, at Guided by Voices, 2013

Cora Cohen and Edward Albee before Curtain8, at ”The Responsibility of Forms,” Guided by Voices, March 2013

2011

Solo exhibition of Altered X-Rays, Field Institute Hombroich, Raketenstation Hombroich, Neuss, Germany.

The Field Institute Hombroich, an exhibition and project space at Raketenstation Hombroich, a former NATO missile station, presents the Altered X-Rays nearly two decades after Cohen began the series in response to the AIDS crisis. The exhibition gives them an independent presentation in the German context where Cohen's practice developed since the 1990s, rather than placing them alongside paintings in a broader survey.

The Field Institute Hombroich exhibition places the series within one of Europe's most distinctive museum settings, nearly two decades after its origins in the AIDS crisis.

Invitation: "Altered X-Rays," Field Institute Hombroich, 2011

Invitation: "Altered X-Rays," Field Institute Hombroich, Neuss, Germany, June 2011

2012

Curtain is acquired by purchase award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Cohen's work appears in the Academy's Invitational Exhibition of Visual Arts, twenty-five years after her first inclusion in 1987.

Solo exhibitions are held at d. m. allison art in Houston, with catalogue, and Heather Gaudio Fine Art in New Canaan.

Invitation: "Cora Cohen, Works on Paper," d.m. allison art, 2012

Invitation: "Cora Cohen, Works on Paper," d.m. allison art, Houston, Texas, January 2012.

2013

Cohen is awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship.
The Responsibility of Forms opens in New York.2526

The exhibition of 2012–13 paintings at Guided by Invoices examines the ground between uncertainty and sureness. It is extensively reviewed in The Brooklyn Rail, on artcritical.com, and in The Huffington Post.

A survey of drawings from 2007–13 is shown at Galerie Hafemann in Wiesbaden.

In an interview with Samuel Jablon for Hyperallergic, Cohen lays out the architecture of the late work: curtain and drawing paintings that begin with the act of seeing before logic takes over, the Nomads, and the Altered X-Rays.

  1. 25 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.

  2. 26 Samuel Jablon, “The Formative Formlessness of Cora Cohen,” Hyperallergic, August 22, 2013.

    Zachary Keeting, “Cora Cohen, Nov 2013,” www.gorkysgranddaughter.com, Winter 2013.

Invitation: "Cora Cohen ...auf papier," Galerie Hafemann, Wiesbaden, 2013

Invitation: "Cora Cohen ...auf papier," Galerie Hafemann, Wiesbaden, September 2013

2014

Urban Virtue, an exhibition of work by Cora Cohen and Susanne Doremus, opens at the Sarah Moody Gallery of Art at the University of Alabama.

Cohen and Doremus also join Sensitive Instruments, a College Art Association panel in Chicago with Molly Zuckerman-Hartung, Michelle Grabner, and others. At the University of Alabama, Urban Virtue pairs their paintings with public conversations on painting, process, generation, community, and academia. The exhibition and discussions connect painters from different contexts who share an interest in how painting is produced, situated, and transmitted.

Invitation: "Urban Virtue," Sarah Moody Gallery of Art, 2014

Invitation: "Urban Virtue," Sarah Moody Gallery of Art, October 2014

2015

Cohen continues exhibiting in New York and Brooklyn while joining a growing circuit of lectures and conversations about painting.
She gives a Visiting Lecture at the Hoffberger School of Painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art and is interviewed for Yale University Radio.27

The Hoffberger lecture continues Cohen's involvement with painting programs and graduate education, following earlier lectures at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Hoffberger. In 2014, she also lectured at Brooklyn College and Marywood University and joined Sensitive Instruments, a College Art Association panel on painting today in Chicago. By 2015, teaching and conversation help circulate her understanding of painting. New York exhibitions include Salon du Dessin at Lennon, Weinberg, Paperazzi IV at Janet Kurnatowski Gallery, and Sideshow Nation III at Sideshow Gallery.

  1. 27 Brainard Carey, “Cora Cohen,” on Yale University Radio WYBCX, March 27, 2015.

Still frame, Gorky's Granddaughter: Interview with Cora Cohen, 2013

Still frame, “Interview with Cora Cohen,” gorky’sgranddaughter.com 2013

2016

Cohen exhibits her “Meander” drawings at the New York Studio School, collaborates with Susanne Doremus in Chicago, and participates in a German museum exhibition.

Karen Wilkin curates the solo exhibition Bridge Freezes Before the Road: Drawings at the New York Studio School Gallery, presenting the drawings as a sustained body rather than an ancillary painting practice. Cora Cohen & Susanne Doremus: Collaborations at Zolla/Lieberman Gallery in Chicago extends the dialogue between artists who had previously exhibited together.

In Germany, Cohen appears in Artists' Painters at the Leopold-Hoesch-Museum in Düren, drawn from Dirk Schroeder's collection. The catalogue devotes a substantial section to Cohen, with texts by Rob Colvin and Barry Schwabsky situating her within an international field of experimental painting crossing abstraction and figuration. The exhibition extends her engagement with German institutions and places her work beside a broader range of approaches to painting.28

  1. 28 Karen Wilkin, “Cora Cohen: Bridge Freezes Before Road,” exh. cat. (New York: The New York Studio School, May 2016).

    Jennifer Riley, “Slippery Conditions: A Show of Drawings by Cora Cohen,” artcritical.com, July 14, 2016.

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

Invitation: “Bridge Freezes Before the Road,” New York Studio School, May 2016

2017

Among other group shows, Cohen exhibits in Bluets, curated by Sofia Leiby at Burning in Water, alongside a younger generation of painters, and continues developing works on paper.

Bluets places Cohen alongside Annie Bielski, Lucy Bull, Eli Farahmand, Sadie Laska, Rachel Eulena Williams, Sofia Leiby, and Molly Zuckerman-Hartung in an exhibition about painting, color, mark-making, and how an artist's presence enters the work without determining it. It positions Cohen in a generationally different field from the one in which she emerged, while her 2017 paintings and drawings continue moving among colored pencil, Flashe, ink, and watercolor. The year is defined less by one institutional event than by the work's continued circulation within abstraction's changing field.

2018

Cohen is elected to the National Academy of Design and participates in several exhibitions concerned with contemporary abstraction.

Her election marks a different recognition: a nineteenth-century institution incorporates a painter whose work developed largely outside dominant narratives of postwar abstraction. It accompanies rather than resolves the changing critical terms through which her work is considered.

Group exhibitions include Four Degrees of Abstraction, curated by Anne-Brigitte Sirois at Kathryn Markel Fine Arts, with Morgan Everhart, Suzanne Olivier, and Xiaofu Wang. At Anita Rogers Gallery, Discourse: Abstract, organized by artist Gayle Ruskin, joins Cohen with ten other New York artists whose approaches range from gestural to minimal. They place her in a field where incompatible aesthetic positions practice abstraction.

Portrait of Cora Cohen by Curtis Eberhardt, 2015

Studio Portrait of Cora Cohen by Curtis Eberhardt, 2015

2019

In December, Cohen moves to a second studio in Long Island City.

Its windows open onto water, barges, and trains. Following the loss of 287 Broadway and the move to Long Island City, the second studio establishes a relation between enclosed making space and the outside world. The East River's industrial landscape becomes part of the physical conditions of Cohen's final working years.

2020

During the pandemic, Cohen works in her living room, returning to unfinished paintings and drawings from across her life.

When the pandemic reaches New York months after her studio move, Cohen uses the imposed isolation to revisit small unfinished works from various periods. She describes the impulse as a recognition that life was not infinite and that what remained unfinished might never be finished unless she acted immediately.

2022

“Cora Cohen: Works from the 1980s” opens at Morgan Presents, her final exhibition during her lifetime.29

The 1980s paintings are materially dense, built through thick paint, scraping, accretion, and erasure, making gesture inseparable from the accumulated history of their making. Created more than thirty years earlier during Neo-Expressionism's dominance, they enter a changed critical field. What changes is not simply their visibility but the histories against which they are seen: how should they be situated within histories that organized postwar abstract painting and were subsequently revised?

Works from the 1980s coincides with Cohen's return to the past in two ways—critically, by exhibiting earlier paintings, and materially, by reintroducing earlier structures into new works. In a 2022 statement, she describes printing the basic structure of earlier works onto primed linen, then working into the printed armature and introducing conflicting scenarios. Past and present become literal: earlier structures are neither repeated nor abandoned but reentered and worked against.

In his Artforum review, Barry Schwabsky relates Cohen's 1980s paintings to both women associated with the New York School and gestural painters emerging after 2000. Yet the relation exceeds shared gesture. In the latter work, gesture can become an image or pictorial form. For Cohen, it is evidence of an event, a trace of action that altered the surface through application, scraping, accumulation, and erasure. Gesture does not merely present painting's act; it records what happened to the painting. This complicates any genealogy placing Cohen simply between the New York School and subsequent painters. Her paintings enter gestural abstraction's history without treating gesture as its image.

  1. 29 “Cora Cohen: Works from the 1980's,” Morgan Presents, New York, September 2022.

    Morgan Aguiar-Lucander, “Cora Cohen: Works from the 1980s,” catalog essay, September 2022.

    Michael Brennan, “Cora Cohen’s thoroughbred abstraction,” Two Coats of Paint, September 22, 2022.

    Alfred MacAdam, “Cora Cohen: Works from the 1980s,” The Brooklyn Rail, October 2022.

    Barry Schwabsky, “Cora Cohen,” Artforum International, January, 2023.

Invitation: "Works from the 1980s," Morgan Presents, September 2023

Invitation: "Works from the 1980s," Morgan Presents, September 2023

2023

Cora Cohen dies in Brooklyn on June 22, at seventy-nine.

Cohen continued painting in her Long Island City studio through her final years, maintaining the relation between painting, place, and the world outside that remained central to her work. She also continued her long association with Germany, where her work had been exhibited and developed substantial critical and institutional contexts since the 1990s. Cohen entered hospice care in her final weeks. She dies as the work begins to be reconsidered historically: Morgan Presents' exhibition of the 1980s paintings had reopened questions about her place within postwar abstraction's histories, even as the late paintings remained unresolved.

Empty Studio, Long Island City, November 2023

2025

Greene Naftali, representing the artist's estate, mounts “Cora Cohen: A Decade: 2012–22.”30

The solo presentation of final-decade paintings and drawings is reviewed in The Brooklyn Rail, Air Mail, Two Coats of Paint, and Whitehot Magazine. David Ebony includes it in his autumn Top Ten list.

That year, Cohen's work also appears in Taking Form: Mark Making as Picture Building at Morgan Presents, a broader reconsideration of mark-making and painting.

  1. 30 “Cora Cohen: A Decade: 2012–22,” Greene Naftali, New York, September 12–November 1, 2025.

    Maggie Turner, “Cora Cohen: A Decade: 2012–22,” Air Mail, September 22, 2025.

    Rebecca Schiffman, “Cora Cohen: A Decade: 2012–22,“ The Brooklyn Rail, October 2025.

    “Cora Cohen - A Decade: 2012-22 - Greene Naftali,” Manhattan Art Review, October 3, 2025.

    Saul Ostrow, “Cora Cohen: Refusing Closure,” Two Coats of Paint, October 8, 2025.

    David Ebony, “David Ebony’s Top 10: Autumn, 2025,” Snapshot, October 21, 2025.

    Colleen Dalusong, “Exhibition Review: Cora Cohen’s Poetics of Sensation,” Whitehot Magazine, November 4, 2025.

Abstract watercolor painting in warm peach, gold, and brown tones, featuring centered white text: “Cora Cohen: A Decade: 2012–22.”

“Cora Cohen A Decade: 2012-2022,” Greene Naftali Exhibition logo

2026

Gregory R. Miller & Co. and the Cora Cohen Trust co-publish Cora Cohen, the definitive monograph.31

The 320-page volume is edited by Jeffrey M. Jones and Sam Jablon, with texts by Marina Adams, Carlo McCormick, Linda Nochlin, Odili Donald Odita, Raphael Rubinstein, Barry Schwabsky, Ivy Shapiro, Jason Stopa, Anne Thompson, and the artist. It details the full span of the practice across paintings, drawings, photographs, and the Altered X-Rays. The book anchors the Trust's program of scholarship, archival access, and institutional engagement.

  1. 31 Cora Cohen, ed. Jeffrey M. Jones and Sam Jablon, New York: Gregory R. Miller & Co. and the Cora Cohen Trust, 2026.

    Sharon Butler, “Sharon’s Substack / June 1, 2026,” Two Coats of Paint, June 2026.

Monograph Cover, 2026

Monograph cover, 2026

2026

The record of Cohen’s career is therefore not one of absence.

The work circulated through galleries, exhibitions, publications, collections, teaching, and criticism while remaining outside abstract painting's mainstream account. Across six decades, it changes materials, procedures, and circumstances without resolving into a single style. The chronology follows these changes without imposing a developmental line, allowing Cohen's continuous position to emerge through the work's forms.

Public collections include the Swedish State Art Council, Stockholm; the Ulla and Heiner Pietzsch Collection, Berlin; the Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro; Yale University; the Bryn Mawr College collections; and the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase. Writing on Cohen appears in the New York Times, Artforum, Art in America, ARTnews, The Brooklyn Rail, Flash Art, The New Yorker, and New York Magazine. She taught and lectured at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Columbia University School of the Arts, the Maryland Institute College of Art, the New York Studio School, and Bennington College.