14 October 2009

Common Lecture: Nancy Cohen's sculpture

Department of Landscape Architecture Lecture Series

Nancy Cohen, Artist
Estuary and Other Landscape-inspired Sculptures

3:55 Wednesday, October 14
110 Cook Douglass Lecture Hall

Nancy Cohen will be showing images of her recent landscape-based work and discussing the development of her ideas and working methods. Cohen is a mixed-media artist who works in sculpture, installation and drawing. Recent large-scale projects have included a site-specific installation based on the Hudson River for the Katonah Museum of Art and a collaboration with marine biologists and environmentalists based on the Mullica River for the Noyes Museum of Art in Oceanville, NJ. In 2006, Cohen collaborated with Princeton University scientists and a garden designer on an outdoor sculpture for Quark Park in Princeton, NJ.

From a review by Dominique Nahas in Sculpture Magazine, September, 2008: Throughout her career, Nancy Cohen has experimented with materials and forms that underscore the relational possibilities between the appearance of transparency and its opposite, opaqueness. Her naturalist tendencies are abetted by an ethnographer's curiosity and a keen appreciation of cultural parallels and anomalies. All of her various works explore sensations provoked by liminality, that is, threshold states of mind conditioned by factors conducive to transition and transformation.

Cohen has been awarded a Pollack Krasner grant and several sculpture grantsnfrom the NJ State Council on the Arts. Her work can be found in the permanent collections of the NJ State Museum, Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Museum, Montclair Art Museum, & Yale University Art Museum among others. Recent exhibitions have included "Handwork" at Spanierman Modern Gallery in NYC and "Global Warning: Artists and Climate Change" at Wesleyan University.
www.nancymcohen.com

7 comments:

Apes said...

I don't think this is any surprise to anyone but this lecture was easily my FAVORITE common lecture in my almost three years here.

I was so taken by the color, form, concept, material, and texture used in Nancy's work.

Of course all of the large scale pieces were amazing but I was so inspired by her "drawings." The depth created by her use of layering materials, texture, and color could be used in so many ways for landscape architecture. Its like a whole new world just opened up in front of me and I want to explore all of it.

Beautiful.

Z said...

This lecture was incredible. It helped myself to vision how you can connect these precious wetlands with people. One way was demonstrated today by Nancy's work. I was very captivated by her study models and understand how important it is to take the times to experiment with different materials.

This lecture has inspired me to explore the different design options that can connect to our Junior studio site of Cape May County. Art and design can stratigically connect the people to the environment, specifically the wetlands.

S.Somers said...

I enjoyed how Nancy talked about working with other professionals. This is something that has kept me interested in LA. Even if you are not an artist, you have the ability to collaborate with artists. That is something that separates our field from a lot of others.

I felt her work was very original, and I will probably keep my eye out for more of it in the future.

The estuary project was my favorite, I liked how she physically used salt within it and tried to capture the feeling of being surrounded by water(literally).

Overall I enjoyed her talk.

Jenna said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Stacey Delgado said...

I REALLY enjoyed this lecture. Overall, my favorite lectures involve some sort of art because I like looking at creative ideas. It makes me excited, no offense to GIS but it keeps my attention and get the wheels in my head turning.

E. Greenwood said...

Nancy Cohen's presentation was quite inspiring. Her work exposed her attention to detail, patience and agility, which are all important in landscape architecture. At the same time, the pieces she talked about were all very fluid and blended in with each environment they were placed in. A lot of her bigger pieces, especially the one at the Noyes museum, reminded me of the fluidity of everyday thought process. Her work seems to provoke a lot of emotion and engages the viewer. One of my favorite lectures this year, and the website is awesome-it has a sizable archive of her work.

Jonathan Jensen said...

This was a very creatively expressive and visual lecture that Nancy Cohen provided for the the LA faculty and students. Nancy is a very talented individual and I appreciate her works of art. She let us know how in depth she investigates each project as she attempts to figure out the best way to express her subject at hand. Another interesting point is that her lecture influenced a classmate so much that she is tweaking an essence of her design project to reflect some of Nancy’s work. This was a brilliant lecture and I thoroughly enjoyed it as ell as the Power Point presentation!