"Her painted panes of glass set in wood, such as 'The Vineyard,' which is on display on the second floor of the Museum of Fine Arts west wing, are best viewed by walking in a small, slow circle around their perimeter. That's how the sea scenes, garments, human forms, and other objects depicted in them come into full view.

"If you start in front, all you see are the vertical streaks of green that mark the thin edges of each pane of glass. But as you circumnavigate, you begin to see how other shades stroked onto each glass sheet dance with one another in three dimensions."

--Michael Prager, Boston Globe, May 26, 2002

"The imagery of Carol Cohen's 'Chartreuse with Baby Bows and an Apple' is explicit in the title, but the storyline of this still life is left to the viewer to complete."

--Sarah Nichols and Davira S. Taragin, curators, "Glass from the Block Collection" exhibition, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh PA, April 2002.
"Carol Cohen's sculpture is meant to frustrate. Her art draws you in with its evanescent, enticingly beautiful forms -- still-lifes, swimmers, clothing -- all things that want to be touched. But when you approach the work, what you get is glass -- delicate yet dangerous, sharp yet intensely fragile, and positively untouchable since the object you think you're looking at isn't even there. Cohen's work lives in a remarkable limbo between painting and sculpture: Her glass assemblages have a presence of sculpture -- they clearly occupy space and resist confinement -- yet astonishingly her figurative sculptures lack physical substance.

"She further complicates the matter by making explicitly figurative sculpture in an age of abstract installation, and by using the tools of decorative art in the playpen of high art."

--Joshua Meyer, "Carol Cohen's Glass Houses", Arts 1999.
"The dead bird is at the heart of the show's opening work, Cohen's 1990 'Kristallnacht,' which is as dark and disturbing as the event that provided its title. Layers of glass curve inward as they rise, as if blown by a wind."

--Christine Temin, Boston Globe, Feb. 3, 1999.
"...panes of evenly spaced, vertical painted glass. It looks like an underwater swimmer. Only, when you approach the glass, the undulating body you thought you saw becomes a mass of precisely brushstroked seagulls clustered into specific patterns.

"The sheer complexity of the unit alone dazzles, but the illusion is what brings you back again and again. You pass the piece once more just for the fun of watching the swimmer take form from an angle, disappear before your eyes as you approach the center and slowly form again as you go by."

--Elisabeth Clark, "Layered Vision", Arts Around Boston Magazine, Summer 1998.
"Cambridge-based glass artist Carol Cohen has one of the most spectacular pieces in the show, Little Compton, an atmospheric and spiritual evocation of a summer interlude."

 --Mark Favermann, Art New England magazine, Dec/Jan. 1997-98.
"The quality of light determines the density of volume. The abstract force of light as energy used as a tool by the sculptor to create reality is a unique phenomenon. To Carol Cohen, layering of images to create an illusionistic experience of volume is further refined by controlling the translucency, transparency and image placement on the glass."

 --Lucartha Kohler, "Glass: An Artist's Medium," Krause Publications, 1998.
"Implicit connections associate the exterior with the interior. In this case, the light greenish cast of the glass sheets creates This enhances the paradox of the viewer's seeing a form that is known not to really exist."

 --Jonathan Fairbanks, Curator of Glass Today exhibition, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1997 (catalogue)
"Cohen's work cannot help giving a visual impact to ones who saw her work... Glass itself grasped her unique point of view [of] a painter and sculptor and has enabled Cohen to produce such a thrilling multi-layered work."

--Tomana Makoto, correspondent, "World Glass Now 1994" exhibition catalogue, Hokkaido, Japan.
"The evolution of her unique format has produced visions which are vaporous and elusive, like a hologram, and fully engaging."

 --Wendy Tarlow Kaplan, curatorial essay for "Transparency Transformed" exhibition, Duxbury Art Complex Museum, May 1994.
"Though the mystery contained in these non-boxes is easily explained, it continues to intrigue the eye. You can view the work from any angle but one: if your eye parallels the edges of the glass sheets the internal image vanishes, and all you see is a stack of green-edged glass sheets. Now-you-see-it, now-you-don't. Prestidigitation with glass."

 --Paul Hollister, "Exploration of Inner Space", Neues Glas magazine, 4/88.
"Carol Cohen, sculptor, ignores what many of us would consider impasses in the pursuit of artistic goals. She has become a proficient backpacker, camping out alone in canyons and mountains to be near the forms that inspire her work. She has worked as a sander and taper in an auto body shop to learn the craft of automotive spray painting. She bends sheets and bars of steel that many sculptors farm out to professional metal workers. What is apparent in Cohen's work is not the effort but the enjoyment and exhilaration of a challenge."

 --Lois Tarlow, Alternative Space, Art New England, June 1981.

home what I do who I am collections bibliography links