Nancy Cohen

Nancy M. Cohen is an American visual artist. 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. She typically works with handmade paper and glass and repurposed objects, materials that underscore qualities such as fragility, liminality, transparency, tactility and provisionality. Since 2007, she has focused on abstracted interpretations of water ecologies affected by human development. 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. 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."