November 21, 2023

“We are deeply saddened by Cora’s passing,” said Bennington College President Laura Walker. “She was a singular force and truly made her mark in American abstract expressionism. We are proud that Bennington played a role in her life and work.” 

Cohen was born in Manhattan in 1943. She studied under Paul Feeley and Lawrence Alloway and received her bachelor of arts degree from Bennington College in 1964. In 1969, she was Artist in Residence in Painting at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1970, she returned to Bennington College for her master of fine arts in painting.

Cohen’s first solo exhibition after graduate school was at the Everson Museum in Syracuse, New York, in 1974. She went on to exhibit widely throughout her career. 

In 1984, New York Times' critic Michael Brenson wrote about her exhibition, Portraits of Women: "The works are dense, brooding and yet elated. The turbulence of the paint not only looks but also feels like freedom."

In 2016, Cohen exhibited works on paper during a show called Bridge Freezes Before the Road at the New York Studio School Gallery. Critics called the work “mysterious and poetic.” Online art publication MutualArt wrote that her works “celebrate both the hand and the particular qualities of their mediums while, at the same time, making us feel that we are in the presence of a distinctive, highly individual personality.” The publication continued, “If we look hard enough at Cohen's works on paper, we can feel that they are coming into being as we watch.” 

In a 2022 review of a show called Cora Cohen: Works from the 1980s at Morgan Presents in New York, Artforum’s Barry Schwabsky wrote that "Cohen’s determination to evade stylistic consistency has made her one of the most underrated painters in New York.” 

In addition to Bennington College, Cohen lectured at Maryland Institute College of Art, Columbia University’s School of the Arts, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her works have been written about in Art in America, Art News, The New Yorker, and New York Magazine. Her work is in the permanent collections of many institutions, including the Swedish State Arts Council in Stockholm, The Ulla and Heiner Pietzsch Collection in Berlin, Yale University in Connecticut, and the Neuberger Museum of Art in upstate New York. 

Cohen is the recipient of a 2013 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship Award. She also received awards from the National Education Association, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and a Yaddo Residency, among many others. ​​

In an entry on her website dated 2022, Cohen wrote about how the pandemic inspired her to go back to paintings and drawings she had not yet finished. She wrote, “My sense that life was not infinite, and that what I had not finished might never get finished unless I finished it right away, took over.”  She continued, “Because they had been begun at different periods, I saw them as bridges between past and present, between the past and a radically uncertain future.”