Diana Cooper (artist)

File:Diana Cooper Orange Alert UK.jpg

Diana Cooper, Orange Alert UK, acetate, acrylic, felt, neoprene, paper, foam core, corrugated plastic and map pins, dimensions variable, 2003–8. MOCA Cleveland/Postmasters Gallery.

Diana Cooper (born 1964) is an American visual artist, known for largely abstract, improvised hybrid constructions that combine drawing, painting, sculpture, installation and photography.<ref name="Wei08">Wei, Lilly. "Line Analysis," Art in America, April 2008, p. 154–7.</ref><ref name="MacAdam12">MacAdams, Barbara. "Pink and Red and NASCAR Too," ARTnews, December 2012. Retrieved March 28, 2022.</ref><ref name="Knight05">Knight, Christopher. "Random acts as part of the plan," Los Angeles Times, January 21, 2005. Retrieved March 28, 2022.</ref> Her art has evolved from canvas works centered on proliferating doodles to sprawling installations of multiplying elements and architectonic structures.<ref name="Johnson98">Johnson, Ken. "Diana Cooper," The New York Times, March 13, 1998, p. E35. Retrieved March 28, 2022.</ref><ref name="Kaneda03">Kaneda, Shirley and Saul Ostrow. "Diana Cooper," BOMB, Spring 2003.</ref><ref name="Wei09">Wei, Lilly. "Diana Cooper," UrbanGlass Art Quarterly, Fall 2009.</ref> Critics have described her earlier work—primarily made with craft supplies such as markers, pens, foamcore, pushpins, felt, pipe cleaners, tape and pompoms—as humble-looking yet labor-intensive,<ref name="Caniglia02">Caniglia, Julie. "Diana Cooper," Artforum, December 2002. Retrieved March 29, 2022.</ref> provisional and precarious,<ref name="Asper07">Asper, Colleen. "Diana Cooper," Beautiful/Decay, Issue W, 2007/</ref> and "a high-wire act attempting to balance order and pandemonium."<ref name="Kaneda03"/> They note parallels to earlier abstract women artists such as Eva Hesse, Lee Bontecou, Elizabeth Murray, and Yayoi Kusama.<ref name="Crutchfield07">Crutchfield, Margo A. and Barbara Pollack. Beyond the Line: the Art of Diana Cooper, Cleveland/New York: Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland/Distributed Art Publishers, 2007. Retrieved March 28, 2022.</ref><ref name="Smith97">Smith, Roberta. "Diana Cooper," The New York Times, February 14, 1997, p. C32. Retrieved March 28, 2022.</ref> Lilly Wei, however, identifies an "absurdist playfulness and Orwellian intimations" in Cooper's work that occupy a unique place in contemporary abstraction.<ref name="Wei08"/>

Cooper has received the Rome Prize,<ref name="AAR">American Academy in Rome. "American Academy in Rome Announces 2003-2004 Rome Prize Winners," Press. Retrieved March 28, 2022.</ref> a Guggenheim Fellowship,<ref name="GUG">John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Diana Cooper, Fellows. Retrieved March 28, 2022.</ref> and awards from the Anonymous Was A Woman,<ref name="Anon">Anonymous Was a Woman. Recipients. Retrieved March 28, 2022.</ref> Pollock-Krasner and Joan Mitchell foundations.<ref name="PK">Pollock-Krasner Foundation. Diana Cooper, Artists. Retrieved March 31, 2022.</ref> She has been commissioned to create public artworks for New York City and the Moss Arts Center at Virginia Tech,<ref name="VT">Virginia Tech. "New public art installation will transform the walls of the Moss Arts Center Grand Lobby," Articles. Retrieved March 29, 2022.</ref><ref name="MTA">MTA Arts Design. "Art Along the Way." Retrieved March 29, 2022.</ref> and her work has been acquired by the Museum of Fine Arts Boston,<ref name="MFAB">Museum of Fine Arts Boston. "Tidal Pool, Diana Cooper," Collections. Retrieved January 19, 2024.</ref> the British Museum and the Pinakothek der Moderne (Munich).<ref name="BM">The British Museum. Drawing, Diana Cooper, Collection. Retrieved March 29, 2022.</ref><ref name="PM">Pinakothek der Moderne. Diana Cooper. Artists. Retrieved May 13, 2022.</ref> Cooper is based in Brooklyn, New York and is married to the scholar and essayist Mark Lilla.<ref name="Lanfranco19">Lanfranco, Katerina. "Seeing the World Anew: POVarts in the Studio with Diana Cooper," POV Arts, December 2, 2019. Retrieved March 31, 2022.</ref><ref name="MacAdam12"/>

Early life and career

Cooper was born in Greenwich, Connecticut in 1964 to Ian and Faith Cooper, who were both artists and teachers at private schools.<ref name="Pollack07">Pollack, Barbara. "Deliberate Doodles and Random Thoughts," Beyond the Line: the Art of Diana Cooper, Cleveland/New York: Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland/Distributed Art Publishers, 2007. Retrieved March 28, 2022.</ref><ref name="Lanfranco19"/> She was drawn to dance and choreography in her youth, but turned to the visual arts while majoring in history and literature at Harvard University (BA, 1986).<ref name="MacAdam12"/><ref name="Pollack07"/> After graduating, she took courses at the New York Studio School, before earning an MFA in painting from Hunter College in 1997.<ref name="MacAdam12"/>

Cooper began exhibiting doodle-based works on canvas in the latter 1990s. She appeared in group shows at the New Museum and Knitting Factory and gained early notice for solo exhibitions at Ah! Space Gallery (1997) and Postmasters Gallery (1998) in New York.<ref name="Smith97"/><ref name="Johnson98"/> Since then, she has continued to exhibit at Postmasters, and in 2007 received a ten-year retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland in 2007.<ref name="Waxman05">Waxman, Lori. "Diana Cooper," Artforum, March 2005. Retrieved March 29, 2022.</ref><ref name="Saltz13">Saltz, Jerry. "Critic’s Pick," New York Magazine, January 28, 2013.</ref><ref name="Crutchfield07"/> She has also appeared in exhibitions at the Whitney Museum at Altria,<ref name="NY07">The New Yorker. "Goings on About Town: Burgeoning Geometries," February 2–5, 2007.</ref> MoMA PS1, The Drawing Room (London),<ref name="Wood04">Wood, Jon. Diana Cooper, Hew Locke, London: Drawing Room, 2004. Retrieved March 29, 2022.</ref> SculptureCenter,<ref name="Glueck01">Glueck, Grace. "Personal Abstractions," The New York Times, February 16, 2001, p. E39. Retrieved March 28, 2022.</ref> Contemporary Arts Center (Cincinnati), Sharjah Art Museum (United Arab Emirates),<ref name="SMA03">Sharjah Museum of Art. 6th Sharjah Biennial, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates: Sharjah Museum of Art, 2003.</ref> and He Xiangning Art Museum (China), among others.<ref name="Xiangning">He Xiangning Art Museum. The Logic of Paper: American Works on Paper, Shenzhen, China: He Xiangning Art Museum, 2010.</ref><ref name="Crutchfield07"/> Since 2008, Cooper has been an adjunct associate professor at Columbia University's School of the Arts.<ref name="CUSA">Columbia University School of the Arts. Diana Cooper, Profiles. Retrieved April 22, 2022.</ref><ref name="CUSA2">Columbia University School of the Arts. "Adjunct Associate Professor Diana Cooper in Retrospective," News, March 19, 2018. Retrieved May 2, 2022.</ref>

Work and reception

Cooper is known for her ability to extend two-dimensional sensibilities and geometries into three dimensional "hybrid constructions" and installations.<ref name="Delgado08">Delgado, Lisa. "Diana Cooper," The Architect's Newspaper, February 2008.</ref><ref name="Knight05"/><ref name="Crutchfield07"/> She often relies on reduced color—keying works to one or two primary hues—and simple shapes as basic units, translating thoughts, experiences, emotions and information into abstract visual language.<ref name="Asper07"/><ref name="Johnson98"/><ref name="Caniglia02"/><ref name="MacAdam12"/> Her use of line, grid and form has been linked to artists such as Mondrian, the Constructivists, minimalists Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt and Tony Smith, and Peter Halley, but is more directly connected to accumulative artists such as Judy Pfaff, Jessica Stockholder and Sarah Sze.<ref name="Caniglia02"/><ref name="Macfarlane06">Macfarlane, Kate and Katherine Stout. "Spatial Drawing," The Drawing Book, London: Black Dog Publishers. Retrieved March 28, 2022.</ref><ref name="Smith99">Smith, Roberta. "Diana Cooper," The New York Times, September 17, 1997, p. E36. Retrieved March 28, 2022.</ref><ref name="White05">White, Roger. "Diana Cooper," The Brooklyn Rail, April 2005. Retrieved March 29, 2022.</ref> Critic David Cohen has distinguished her from the latter group, identifying a "divided sensibility" that maintains both a handmade, casually obsessive mode and a systematizing one committed to taxonomies of form and function.<ref name="Cohen18">Cohen, David. "Mappa Mundi: Diana Cooper at the Studio School," Artcritical, April 15, 2018. Retrieved March 28, 2022.</ref> He wrote that all of her work—regardless of format or scale—remains in the orbit of drawing, poised between doodle and collage and operating "as a way of being in the world."<ref name="Cohen18"/>

File:Diana Cooper The Multicolor One.jpg

Diana Cooper, The Multicolor One, acrylic, felt tip markers, felt, acetate, paper, pipe cleaners, and pom poms on canvas, wall and floor, 87" x 107" x 37", 1997–8.

Canvases and wall reliefs

By the mid-1990s, Cooper abandoned painting in favor of a more personal form of expression involving expansive, Sharpie-marker doodles on canvas stapled to walls.<ref name="Griffin98">Griffin, Tim. "Diana Cooper," Art in America, November 1998.</ref><ref name="Schjeldahl99">Schjeldahl, Peter. "Thanks for Painting," The Village Voice, March 17, 1998.</ref><ref name="Gleeson00">Gleeson, David. "Diana Cooper," TimeOut (UK), November 15–22, 2000.</ref> In these works, tiny lines and circles (generally red, yellow, blue or black) accumulated to form dense networks, grids and mazes.<ref name="Johnson98"/><ref name="Smith97"/> The Black One (1997) is a representative work—a monochromatic canvas covered in black doodles, its surface embellished with metastasizing protrusions of pipe-cleaner chutes and ladders, pockets of pompoms, tape and construction netting.<ref name="Griffin98"/><ref name="Johnson98"/><ref name="Wei08"/><ref name="Cohen18"/> Reviews noted these labyrinthine designs for their graphic skill, sense of improvisation, and play of organic (cells), informational (maps, architectural plans) and technological (electrical circuitry, computer chips, bar codes, pixels) allusions.<ref name="Smith97"/><ref name="Griffin98"/><ref name="Dailey99">Dailey, Meghan. "Diana Cooper," Artforum, December 1999. Retrieved March 29, 2022.</ref> New York Times critic Ken Johnson wrote, "Cooper's additive process is not uncontrolled. Out of the tension between structures of order and containment and impulses of transgression and expansion, grows a ramshackle architecture or a kind of schematic model of the mind at play."<ref name="Johnson98"/>

In later works, Cooper explored more varied and elaborate formats whose elements spilled off canvases onto walls and floors.<ref name="Griffin99">Griffin, Tim. "Diana Cooper," TimeOut, September 30-October 7, 1999.</ref><ref name="Smith99"/><ref name="Schjeldahl99"/><ref name="Glueck01"/> Los Angeles Times critic Christopher Knight situated these wall reliefs (e.g., My Eye Travels, 2005) between self-contained drawings and "environmental deluge," likening them to visualizations of the ways computer viruses might work: "Havoc occurs through precise channels of organization, manic energy merges with exacting control and data seem to wobble between ferocious and benign. The structure of her art is a hybrid of machine regularity and human caprice."<ref name="Knight05"/>

File:Diana Cooper Astral Lift.jpg

Diana Cooper, Astral Lift, mixed media, inkjet prints, charcoal, spray paint, pencil and acrylic paint, 90" x 24" x 29", 2018–9.

Installations and sculptural works

In the 2000s, Cooper expanded her practice to include furniture-like sculptures and full installations that increasingly colonized their exhibition spaces.<ref name="Glueck05">Glueck, Grace. "Off the Wall," The New York Times, September 30, 2005. Retrieved March 28, 2022.</ref><ref name="Scott07">Scott, Andrea K. “Burgeoning Geometries," The New York Times, January 5, 2007. Retrieved March 31, 2022.</ref><ref name="AN">The Architects Newspaper. "Constructed Abstractions," January 11, 2007.</ref><ref name="Carrier08">Carrier, David. "Diana Cooper," Artforum, February 2008. Retrieved March 29, 2022.</ref> Speedway (2000–3) was a freestanding, De Stijl-styled foamcore structure, consisting on one side of a cutaway that Nancy Princenthal described as "a Las Vegas marquee of pulsing concentric and parallel lines, punctuated by seedily alluring little niches,"<ref name="Princenthal02">Princenthal, Nancy. "Diana Cooper," Art in America, November 2002.</ref> and on the other, a dollhouse-like grid of cubbyholes, suggesting a Mondrian/Donald Judd-influenced "mini-museum."<ref name="Caniglia02"/><ref name="Cohen18"/> The mutating, increasingly elaborate installation Orange Alert UK (2003–8) employed taut linear arrangements of vivid reds, oranges and yellows, initially inspired by the color-coded, post-9/11 terrorist alert system, which formed cardiograph-like wall patterns and radiated from a central, spider-like form.<ref name="Wood04"/><ref name="Delgado08"/><ref name="Wei08"/><ref name="DR">The Drawing Room. "Diana Cooper & Hew Locke," Exhibitions. Retrieved May 11, 2022.</ref>

Photo-derived work

Digital photography and themes involving the built environment play a greater role in Cooper's later work, which has employed fewer elements and sometimes taken on a frieze-like appearance (e.g., the illusionistic wall-piece, Undercover, 2010–3).<ref name="Pollack13">Pollack, Barbara. "Diana Cooper, 'My Eye Travels,'" Time Out (New York), February 14, 2013. Retrieved March 31, 2022.</ref><ref name="Brody17">Brody, David. "Site Specific: Diana Cooper and Lee Boroson," Artcritical,, March 28, 2017. Retrieved March 31, 2022.</ref><ref name="Indrisek14">Indrisek, Scott. "Singing Mussels, Swimming Pools, and Airplants: This Is Sculpture," Artinfo, June 20, 2014.</ref> She uses photography to create sketchbook-like collections of abstract forms taken from everyday experience—details of airport tarmacs, subway seats, grass, refuse, construction fencing, or gallery architecture—which she re-presents out of context, revealing neglected qualities of beauty and strangeness or to create hyperreal spatial illusions (e.g., Skylight I, 2012–3).<ref name="Pollack13"/><ref name="Saltz13"/><ref name="Lanfranco19"/> Jerry Saltz described her 2013 show, "My Eye Travels," as "a florid blaze of color, pattern, abstraction, and images of bits of the world," composed almost entirely of photographs "assembled into fragmenting mandalas of contemporary energy."<ref name="Saltz13"/>

Several later exhibitions feature more self-contained pieces, sometimes working in relation to one another.<ref name="MacAdam12"/> The installation The Wall (2018) presented several dozen, disparate smaller works hung salon-style, which together functioned like a diaristic, graphic index of Cooper's concerns.<ref name="Cohen18"/> "Sightings" (2019) consisted of more autonomous works and closed compositions that referenced and framed distinct, bound systems of urban structure, electronics and technology in order to encourage new ways of seeing (e.g., Slide Rule or Family Safe).<ref name="Lanfranco19"/>

Public art commissions

File:Diana Cooper Double Take 2023.tif

Diana Cooper, Double Take, mosaic, ceramic, marble, granite and powder-coated aluminum, 2023. MTA Arts & Design Commission, Roosevelt Island, New York City.

Cooper has received three public art commissions. Her first was the permanent, site-specific work, Out of the Corner of My Eye (2008–9, commissioned by NYC Cultural Affairs Percent for Art) for the Jerome Parker Campus in Staten Island.<ref name="NYCPA">NYC Percent for Art. Diana Cooper, Projects. Retrieved April 26, 2022.</ref> Situated along a slow-curving, 107-foot-long wall in an Ennead Architects-designed building, the work employed more durable materials than past work—glass (inserted into pre-existing windows), fiberboard, metal hardware, and acrylic paint—and received an Americans for the Arts public art award.<ref name="Wei09"/><ref name="MacAdam12"/>

For HighWire (2016, Moss Arts Center), Cooper developed her concept and imagery digitally, combining scans of her drawings with data visualization imagery alluding to micro- and macro- organic and technological systems. She printed the scans on PhotoTex—a repositionable adhesive material similar to that used in commercial signage—then hand-painted over them, reimagining the data as a lyrical, six-walled, 17-foot-tall, 116-foot-long landscape.<ref name="Hicklin16">Hicklin, Meggin A. "Above and beyond…," Diana Cooper: Highwire, 2016, Blacksburg, VA: Virginia Tech, 2016.</ref><ref name="VT"/> In 2023, MTA Arts and Design unveiled Cooper's commissioned permanent public mural, Double Take, an 8-by-96-foot, glass mosaic, ceramic, granite and aluminum work located on Roosevelt Island.<ref name="Lanfranco19"/><ref name="MTA23">MTA. Double Take, Diana Cooper, Collection. Retrieved January 19, 2024.</ref> Her design marries geometric forms found in the location's ventilation building, the Queensboro Bridge and other surrounding structures with fluid hand-drawn and organic forms reflecting the natural setting and backdrop of the East River.<ref name="MTA23"/><ref name="MTA2">MTA Arts & Design. "Diana Cooper's permanent mosaic and metal artwork Double Take." Retrieved January 19, 2024.</ref><ref name="Chorun23">Chorun, Julia. "11 Must-See NYC Art Installations," Untapped Cities, August 2023. Retrieved January 19, 2024.</ref>

Awards and public collections

Cooper has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship (2000),<ref name="GUG"/> an American Academy in Rome Prize (2003–4),<ref name="AAR"/> and awards from Anonymous Was A Woman (2013),<ref name="Anon"/> the Pollock-Krasner Foundation (2018, 2013, 2008),<ref name="AF19">Artforum. "Pollock-Krasner Foundation Awards More Than $3 Million in Grants," News. April 17, 2019. Retrieved March 29, 2022.</ref><ref name="AF09">Artforum. "Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grants for 2008–2009 Announced," News. September 25, 2009. Retrieved March 29, 2022.</ref> Joan Mitchell Foundation (2013), New York Foundation for the Arts (2013, 2000), Bogliasco Foundation (2011), and Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation Space Program (2004–5).<ref name="Crutchfield07"/><ref name="SW">Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program. "Artists 1991-2013," Retrieved March 31, 2022.</ref> She has received artist residencies from the Atlantic Center for the Arts, Institute for Electronic Arts, La Cite Internationales des Arts (Paris), and Virginia Tech.<ref name="MacAdam12"/><ref name="VT"/>

Her work belongs to the collections of public institutions including the British Museum,<ref name="BM" /> Cleveland Clinic,<ref name="CCC">Cleveland Clinic. "The Power of Art: Cleveland Clinic Collection," Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Clinic, 2017, p. 81.</ref> Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art,<ref name="HMA">Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art. Trip, Diana Cooper, Collections. Retrieved March 29, 2022.</ref> Katzen Arts Center, Museum of Fine Arts Boston,<ref name="MFAB"/> New York Public Library, Pinakothek der Moderne<ref name="PM" /> and Progressive Art Collection, among others.<ref name="Progressive">The Progressive Corporation. "Art," 2007 Annual Report, Mayfield Village, OH: The Progressive Corporation, p. 3, 40.</ref>

Further reading

• Interview with Barbara Pollack, "Beyond the Line: The Art of Diana Cooper", 2008, Template:ISBN
• Jon Wood, '’Diana Cooper Hew Locke’', London, The Drawing Room, 2004, Template:ISBN
• Marion Daniel, “Diana Cooper, Systems that Make No Sense,” Roven, n4, 2010
• Interview by Jean Crutchfield. The Bradford-Renick Gallery, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, Virginia. 2001

External links

• Diana Cooper website
• "Seeing the World Anew: POVarts in the Studio with Diana Cooper," 2019
• Diana Cooper: Highwire, Foltagraphy, 2019
• Diana Cooper artist page, Postmasters