Nancy Cohen’s work in handmade paper and glass examines resiliency in relation to the environment and the human body. Recent solo exhibitions include Nancy Cohen: The State We’re In at Kathryn Markel Fine Arts in NYC, and Nancy Cohen: Atlas of Impermanence at The Visual Arts Center of NJ in Summit, NJ. Recent group exhibitions include New Acquisitions at The New Jersey State Museum, Trenton, NJ; Legacies in Paper: Nancy Cohen, Sara Garden Armstrong and Helen Heibert at the Robert C. Williams Museum of Papermaking in Atlanta, GA; Yvette Molina: A Promise to the Leaves at the Tang Museum in Saratoga Springs, NY; and Transgressing Lands: Eleven Contemporary Artist Reimagine a Horizon at The Boiler in Brooklyn, NY. Recent installations include Once She Dries, an experimental opera and multidisciplinary collaborative installation that was included in the International Biennial of Paper & Fibre Art at Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Hall, Taipei and the NTCRI Museum of Craft Design in Nantou, Taiwan. In September 2026, Cohen and Anna Boothe will have a collaborative exhibition/installation at UrbanGlass in Brooklyn, NY.
Her awards include six fellowships from the NJ State Council on the Arts, two from the Jersey City Arts and Culture Trust Fund, two from the Brodsky Center, The Murray Reich Distinguished Artist Award, and a Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant. Other residencies include Yaddo, Millay Arts, Dieu Donne, Wheaton Arts, Pyramid Atlantic, Women’s Studio Workshop and The Tides Institute. 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.At MacDowell in 2023, Cohen worked on a series of handmade paper works to be shown at Kathryn Markel Fine Arts in 2024. During her 2026 residency, Cohen worked on a series of ceramic sculptures and handmade paper/paper pulp drawings involving ideas of protection, vulnerability, fragility and their opposites, aggression, power and resilience. This work will be shown at Kathryn Markel Fine Arts in Chelsea, NYC in Spring of 2027.
