Rachel bas-Cohain (1937-1982) was a conceptual artist whose work consisted of sculptural assemblage, installation, printmaking, earthworks, and watercolors. Trained primarily in painting and printmaking, bas-Cohain began experimenting with a wide variety of materials and processes in the late 1960s, producing works that blurred and transgressed boundaries between traditional categories of artistic media and between art and life. Between 1968 and 1970, bas-Cohain was awarded a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where her involvement in the feminist movement grew. In 1972, she joined 19 other women artists in founding A.I.R. Gallery, the first women’s cooperative gallery of its kind in the United States.
bas-Cohain is best known for her 1973 series entitled, How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Grid, a wry critique of cold war politics, and her explicitly feminist gallery installations and pieces. In subsequent works, bas-Cohain used materials such as tea, cigarette paper, latex, fiberglass, sand, and cosmetics. She received her arts education at the Art Students League of New York, The New School for Social Research, the Brooklyn Museum School, and Brooklyn College.
