Diana Cooper

Diana Cooper (born 1964) is a contemporary artist who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She is best known for her hybrid works combining drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, and installation.

Biography

Diana Cooper was born in Greenwich, Connecticut, to the artists and teachers Ian Cooper and Faith Cooper. She earned her BA in History and Literature from Harvard (1986), and an MFA in painting from Hunter College (1997). She is married to the writer and scholar Mark Lilla.

Artwork

Though initially drawn to dance and choreography when young, Cooper turned to the visual arts after college and studied at the New York Studio School, and counts Elizabeth Murray, Lee Bontecou, and Philip Guston among her influences. She had her first solo exhibition in New York in 1997 and has been represented in the United States by Postmasters Gallery since 1998. Her early works on paper and canvas were based on doodling, while later work became more three-dimensional and incorporated sculptural elements in large-scale works and installations that evoked images of systems and technology. In recent years, she has explored the potential of digital photography for capturing abstraction in the lived environment. Cooper has exhibited her work widely in the U.S., Europe, and China, and was the subject of a ten-year retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland in 2007. She is a former Rome Prize Fellow and has received grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, Anonymous Was A Woman, the Bogliasco Foundation, the Marie Sharpe Foundation, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, Institute for Electronic Arts and other organizations. Her Percent for Art public art commission for the Jerome Parker Campus in Staten Island, New York was named one of the top public art works in the country by Americans for the Arts in 2009. It was also featured on the TV special on Public Art in Public Schools.