Voraciously drawn or forcefully bent, my approach to sculpture, installation, and drawing is a physical and automatic response to internal and external environments. My body is inextricably a tool used in the process. I scavenge for unconventional materials for assemblage; the immediacy of charcoal becomes hard lines that define mental states, and steel is made sensual, alluring, and deeply effeminate. The physicality and its degradation over time is a desire to articulate, through gesture and matter, the inarticulable extremes of death, rebirth, and transformation. Material sensibilities guide the process that initiates an experiential exchange between myself and the context.

Working as a public artist, I am heavily invested in reconnecting to the uniqueness of site locations. I scavenge for materials of personal and collective meaning that allow me to unpack the embedded identities of place. I gather community stories and histories to provide visual material from the community and neighbors. Translating images of family lace into steel and designing an XY math algorithm with students to create stained glass linework- each tailored method includes the audience to which the work serves through direct engagement in its design. Each work is site-specific, designed to share the intimacies of material with and by the community. The openness to process shifts the focus of the efforts not in the present but the future, not on the functionality of tools but on the work to be done- collaboratively. In the studio, classroom, or in communities, I advocate that there are no mistakes in art, only opportunities in the making.

Download: CV
MFA Thesis writing: here
Contact for inquiries or commissions

BIO

Oreen Cohen is a first-generation American of Israeli-Moroccan descent living and working in Pittsburgh, PA. Cohen works as a sculptor, painter, mother, and cultural programmer. She received her MFA from Carnegie Mellon University (2014) and BFA from the University at Buffalo (2008). Working in sculptural metalwork, drawing, and installation, Oreen has developed large-scale public and private commissions in curious locations. She has been active over the past twenty years, participating and collaborating in exhibitions and public commissions nationally and internationally. Along with group exhibitions and special projects, in the last seven years, Oreen’s main focus has been designing, engineering, and fabricating large-scale permanent steel and glass public artworks in Pittsburgh, PA, in a partnership business, OOA Designs. Together creating works for Wightman Park, Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh (2020), Emerald View Park-Pittsburgh (2022), OOA has since dissolved in 2023. Curatorial projects include: “When Artists Enter the Factory” at the Brooklyn Army Terminal, FIGMENT Sculpture Project (Governors Island, NYC), Flint Public Art Project (Flint, MI), and CerCCa Casamarles in Catalonia, Spain. She has received the Investing in Professional Artists grant from The Pittsburgh Foundation and the Heinz Endowments and a New York Foundation for the Arts Grant. Cohen has had solo exhibitions at 707 Gallery, Pittsburgh, PA, Bunker Projects, and Transformer Gallery Washington, DC. Oreen has just completed a residency at the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans in Fall 2023 with new energy in their studio practice to combine drawing, painting glass, and metal fabrication processes. Upcoming residency includes M.A.D.E in San Miguel de Allende, MX (Spring 2024) and a special project with the Rauh Jewish History Program & Archives in Fall 2024. Follow the process at www.oreencohen.com or on Instagram @oco.art