Margaret Cogswell

Margaret Cogswell, Mississippi River Fugues, installation, 2008, Art Museum of the University of Memphis.

Margaret Cogswell (born 1947) is a mixed-media installation artist and sculptor based in New York. She emerged in late 1980s as a sculptor, gaining attention for abstract constructions exploring tensions between natural and human-made materials, roughness and sophistication. Since 2003, Cogswell's work has focused on a series of site-specific installations called "River Fugues": individually unique, multimedia projects involving detailed geographical, historical and social research that explore the intertwining of rivers, industry, people's lives, and the increasingly politicized role of water. The series' title invokes the contrapuntal musical form of the fugue to indicate the weaving of disparate voices, layers and media (video, audio, sculptural elements, works on paper) into a harmonious, composite whole. Critic Lilly Wei described the "River Fugues" as a hybrid form based on musical composition that "expresses the complex beauty of rivers … and sounds an alarm over the sweeping environmental changes that have endangered our natural resources."

Cogswell has exhibited at institutions including the Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels (BOZAR), Zendai Zhujiajiao Art Museum (Shanghai), Hallwalls, Wave Hill, and the Field Museum of Natural History (Chicago). She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts and Pollock-Krasner Foundation, among others. After being based in New York City since her early career, Cogswell lives and works upstate in the Catskill Park area.

Early life and career Cogswell was born in Memphis, Tennessee) in 1947, and at age eighteen months moved with her Presbyterian missionary parents to Japan, where they lived for the next twelve years. She majored in English literature at Rhodes College, receiving a BA degree in 1969. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Cogswell began receiving wider attention for abstract constructions exhibited in group shows at the World Trade Center, Korean Cultural Center, Katonah Museum of Art, and Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art, as well as for solo exhibitions in Japan and at 101 Wooster.

Writers such as The New York Times'''s Michael Kimmelman commented on formal and conceptual tensions within the work: hard versus soft, smooth versus rough, light versus dark, brute versus meditative, and primitive versus sophisticated. ARTnews critic Eleanor Heartney suggested that Cogswell's approach to form, material and arrangement bore the influence of her time in Japan, yielding eloquent, sometimes playful works with an "uneasy tension [and] precariously maintained balance … heightened by our awareness of the very different properties of wood and steel." She described the sculpture Silenced: No Space (1990), as a "dramatic interaction" that reversed expectations by placing lengths of steel girder within the vise-like grip of two pieces of rough wood, their extremities shooting out. Inside Yoknapatapha (Middlebury College, 1992) was inspired by the novels of William Faulkner, and consisted of a visceral environment of five separate elements composed of wood, steel, concrete, bluestone, beeswax and tar that evoked the volatility of nature and the layerings and conflicts of societies. Memento Mori was recreated at the Newhouse Center after first being installed in an abandoned temple in Kanazawa, Japan. Her site-specific response to that research became Cuyahoga Fugues (2003), a weaving of generations of celebratory and elegiac river stories—gathered from steel workers, environmentalists, fishermen, city planners, an historian and children—told through a deceptively simple duct work installation, video projections and captured local sounds. Buffalo River Fugues (Hallwalls, 2006), Ashokan Fugues'' (CUE Art Foundation, 2014; Kleinert/James Center for the Arts, 2016) incorporated atmospheric watercolors, sculptural components (metallic facsimiles of city water towers with translucent tanks and oversized umbrellas), and audio and video recordings of interviews with New York and Catskill residents; it served as an elegy to the unsung sacrifice of those in the Catskills who lost their homes due to the reservoir system construction.