Liz Cohen

Liz Cohen (United States, 1973) is a photographer, performance artist, and object maker whose decades-long career focuses largely on the intersection 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 an 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 body of work that 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 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 that refer to Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs of the bodybuilder Lisa Lyon.

The artist’s work has been recently included in the survey exhibition, Flow States – LA TRIENAL 2024 at El Museo del Barrio, New York (NY), and the landmark exhibition, Xican-a.o.x. Body at the Perez Art Museum, Miami (FL) in 2024, both 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 transfeminisms at Mimosa House, London (UK) in 2024; Desert Rider: Dreaming in Motion at Denver Art Museum, Denver (CO) in 2023; 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. 

In 2020, Cohen received a Guggenheim Fellowship. Past awards also include the Fountainhead Residency (2024), Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Award (2019); the Creative Capital Foundation Project Grant (2005), and a MacDowell Colony Fellowship (2001).

Liz Cohen lives and works in Phoenix, AZ.

Cohen’s work is interdisciplinary, bringing together inquiry in women’s studies, literature, poetry, and auto mechanics as well as expertise in documentary photography, performance, video, installation, and sculpture.    https://www.lizcohenstudio.com