Nancy Cohen is a visual artist whose experimental works of paper and sculpture installations often include hand-made glass, cement, reformed found objects, metal, and rubber. Through her work, she examines resiliency in relation to the environment and the human body.
Current and recent projects include "Once She Dries," an experimental opera and multidisciplinary collaborative installation, "Your Water/My Sky," a series of nine double-sided banners commissioned by Summit Public Art in Summit, NJ, and "Between Seeing & Knowing" a collaborative installation at the Bergstrom Mahler Museum of Glass in Neenah, WI.
She has been awarded a Pollock Krasner Grant, a Yaddo Fellowship, and multiple Fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. In 2022, Cohen was a recipient of the Murray Reich Distinguished Artist Award from New York Foundation for the Arts, a Denbo Fellowship from Pyramid Atlantic Art Center, and a Studio Residency grant from Women’s Studio Workshop.
Cohen’s work is in the permanent collections of the New Jersey State Museum, Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Museum, Montclair Art Museum, and Yale University Art Museum, among others. In 2016, her solo exhibition, Hackensack Dreaming, was reviewed in ArteFuse and Sculpture Magazine, and was selected as one of ten top exhibitions of the fall by Interior Design Magazine. She is currently working on a series of large-scale, tapestry-like handmade paper and paper pulp drawings exploring images and memories of, primarily, waterways in industrialized New Jersey (but at times farther afield), and recently more personal observations of not dissimilar struggles of aging and those arising during the COVID-19 pandemic.
At MacDowell in 2023, Cohen worked on a series of handmade paper works to be shown at Kathryn Markel Fine Arts in 2024. Shortly after leaving MacDowell she was headed to Taiwan to install a large collaborative installation "Once She Dries" at "Earth Speaking: Giving Voice to Paper" an international biennial of art in handmade paper.
