Liz Cohen

Liz Cohen (b. 1973) is a photographer and performance artist whose decades-long career focuses largely on the intersections of immigration, industry, labor and women’s representation in popular media. Cohen is perhaps best known for her BODYWORK project, in which she simultaneously transformed a dilapidated East German Trabant into an American El Camino lowrider while inhabiting a new identity herself as a car customizer and bikini model. Through this immersive series, Cohen produced a profoundly influential body of work which challenges American cultural norms as they pertain to the eroticization of the automobile industry as well as the challenging role of women’s bodies in that space. Cohen’s most recent series, BODY MAGIC (2020), sees the artist further explore similar themes. In black and white photographs, Cohen poses with the iconic lowrider model Dazza Del Rio in images which make reference to Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs of the bodybuilder Lisa Lyon.

The artist’s work is currently included in the landmark exhibition, With Eyes Opened: Cranbrook Academy of Art Since 1932, at the Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills (MI) until September, with an accompanying catalogue. In early 2021, Cohen was the subject of a survey retrospective, Body/Magic, at the Arizona State University Art Museum, Tempe (AZ).

Recent group exhibitions include Unapologetic: All Women, All Year at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (AZ) in 2020; Stories of Abstraction: Contemporary Latin American Art in the Global Context at the Phoenix Art Museum (AZ) in 2020; and Shapeshifters: Transformations in Contemporary Art at the Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills (MI) in 2020. Cohen’s work was also featured in 2011 at the 54th Venice Biennale. Since 2017, Cohen has served as Associate Professor of the School of Art at Arizona State University, Tempe.

In 2020, Cohen received a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship. Past awards also include the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Award (2019); the Creative Capital Foundation Project Grant (2005); and a MacDowell Colony Grant (2001).