Nancy Cohen

Nancy M. Cohen is an American visual artist.^[1] 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.^[2][3][4] She typically works with handmade paper and glass and repurposed objects, materials that underscore qualities such as fragility, liminality, transparency, tactility and provisionality.^[5][6][7][2] Since 2007, she has focused on abstracted interpretations of water ecologies affected by human development.^{[1][8][9][10]} 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.^[11][4] 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."^[4]

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.^{[12][13][14][15][1]} Her work belongs to the collections of institutions including the Asheville Art Museum,^[16] Bergstrom-Mahler Museum of Glass,^[17] Memphis Brooks Museum of Art,^[18] and Montclair Art Museum.^[19] She has exhibited at those museums as well as at the SculptureCenter, The Textile Museum and Newark Museum of Art, among other venues.^[20][21][9]

Cohen is based in Jersey City, New Jersey.^[19][22]