Barbara Cooper

Barbara Cooper, Cyclus, wood and glue, 44" x 46" x 26", 1994. Barbara Cooper (born 1949) is an American artist whose practice encompasses abstract sculpture, public and installation art, drawing and set design. She is most known for her sculpture, which emphasizes process, handcraft, and its basis in natural forms and processes of transformation, such as growth, protection and regeneration. Critic Polly Ullrich writes that "Cooper's hand-intensive art is an art of condensation" that takes "the flow of time and growth as a subject"; that quality often leads writers to align Cooper with postminimalism. John Brunetti describes her work as "sinuous, tactile sculptures [that] quietly juxtapose conceptual and formal dichotomies, among them the organic and man-made, the feminine and the masculine, movement and stasis."

Cooper has exhibited at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (MCA), Hafnarfjördur Centre of Culture and Fine Art (Iceland), and Bellevue Arts Museum, and been commissioned for public art works in cities including Chicago, Toledo, and Providence. Her work has been discussed in diverse publications, among them, Art in America, Arts Magazine, Sculpture, Fiberarts and American Craft, and belongs to public art collections including the Smithsonian Museum, MCA Chicago, and Long Beach Museum of Art.

Early life and career Cooper was born and raised in Philadelphia; her father was a biochemist and that influence is evident in her art. In 1986, she relocated to Chicago, where she has taught at the Art Institute of Chicago (1987–2009) and Harper College (1988–2001).

During her first decade of professional exhibition, Cooper was featured in solo shows at the Yellowstone Art Museum (1985), Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland (1985) and Artemisia Gallery (Chicago, 1987, 1988), and group shows at the Evanston Art Center, Hyde Park Art Center and Randolph Street Gallery, among others. or liken her art to that of Martin Puryear. Curator Mary Jane Jacob wrote that "Cooper is fascinated by the 'brain' of nature," the way organisms respond to external stresses and need by producing unique growth patterns and distortions in order to build strength and resilience, repair and re-balance. In her mature, post-1987 work, Cooper employs working methods derived from both her early fiber training—plaiting and the organic, linear build of spinning and weaving—and studies of accretive natural phenomena, such as animal architecture, the growth of trees, or geological forces.

Sculpture After moving to Chicago in 1987, Cooper began working with veneer scraps recycled from woodworking factories; the material connected her art to the greater ecological whole through a life cycle of extraction from nature, industrial processing and discard, and transformation into organic aesthetic forms. Her process involved methodically bending and layering the fragile veneer in loose, interlaced weaves that created undulating, penetrable skins or shell-like armor around hollow, biomorphic cores: cocoon, spiral, bulb, limb, vessel and nest forms.

In the late 1990s, critics identified a new intensity and frankness in Cooper's sculpture, which often features commanding, larger-than-human scaled tree-, column- or torso-like forms that express themes of vulnerability, healing, and ecological threat.

Drawings Throughout her career, Cooper has created and exhibited drawings that function as parallel works rather than studies, and reveal her sculpture's dependence on line, gesture and fluidity. Susan Snodgrass described her mid-1990s "Gyration" charcoal series, based on foliage in rural France, as "morphic bodies writhing through ambiguous backdrops" with a "commanding, yet lyrical physicality." Current (2007, Chicago Public Library, Avalon Branch) is a 20-foot-long horizontal, suspended sculpture of layered, undulating wood forms that echo the layering of pages and collected books and suggest the ripple effect of learning on a community. The 82-foot mosaic Interval 2009, (T. F. Green Airport, Providence) features undulating blue forms suggesting the flow of a waterfall as a metaphor for the fluidity of movement and tensions associated with air travel and weather; Cooper based the hand-painted forms on collaged found photos of nature and the work's structure on the naturally occurring mathematical Fibonacci series.

In addition to her artwork, Cooper has created set designs for an Athenaeum Theatre (Chicago) production and a Hedwig Dances production, Dance of Forgotten Steps (2010). In 2013, she collaborated with choreographer Jan Bartoszek to create ASCENDance, a fifty-minute multimedia dance work that features dancers manipulating large, origami-based sculptural elements, an entirely new form for Cooper.

Collections and recognition Cooper's work is in many public and private art collections, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Long Beach Museum of Art, Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest, Columbus Museum of Art, Contemporary Museum Honolulu, Cranbrook Art Museum, Illinois State Museum, Racine Art Museum, and Yellowstone Art Museum, among others.

Cooper has been recognized with grants from the National Endowment for the Arts (1994), Illinois Arts Council (three, 1988–2009) and City of Chicago (1991), and awarded artist residencies from the Wilderness Workshop, Bloedel Reserve, Museum of Copenhagen, Kohler Arts Center, Hafnarfjördur Centre, Camargo Foundation, MacDowell Colony, Ragdale, Montalvo Arts Center, and Yaddo, among others.