Hallie Cohen

Title

Chair of Art and Art History
Professor of Art
Director, Hewitt Gallery of Art

Department

Art and Art History

Email

hcohen@mmm.edu

About

Hallie Cohen received her M.F.A. from the Hoffberger School of Painting of the Maryland Institute College of Art, where she studied with the painter Grace Hartigan and received the Henry Walters Traveling Fellowship. She received her B.F.A. from the Tyler School of Art where she majored in painting and drawing and minored in printmaking. She has been at Marymount Manhattan since 1974 where she has taught drawing, figure drawing, painting, design, watercolor, and art history to two generations of art and non-art majors.

As Gallery Director of the Hewitt Gallery of Art at MMC since 2013, Professor Cohen investigates multi-disciplinary topics in such shows as Making Visible: Migration & Identity, Go Figure: The Female Gaze, Psychogeograpgy, Après Coup: Transforming Trauma into Art, Present Danger, Study Abroad: The Artist As Immigrant and ALTERED STATES: Reuse RefuseAs curator of the Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of Imagination, Cohen organized and curated over 20 exhibitions of contemporary artists in exhibitions like The Art of the Graphic Novel, Hive/Web/Mind: Animal Nests & Human Networks and The Aesthetics of Math

Cohen paints in watercolor, creates sculptures and three-dimensional installations, and illustrates writer Francis Levy’s short stories and humor. The Kafka Studies Department, published by Heliotrope Books, ( 2023) is their newest collaboration. Cohen’s work in watercolor investigates the fluidity of the medium in several series: RNA, hy·drog·ra·phy  (hī-drŏg′rə-fē) and, overmyhead, paintings dedicated to artists and scientists. 

She has been a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome’s (AAR) Visiting Artists and Scholars Program in January 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, and March 2022. 

Professor Cohen is a founding member of the artists’ group Retrogarde, exhibiting her work at Westbeth Gallery, Fox Gallery NYC, The Cork Gallery at Lincoln Center, La Mama’s La Galleria, A.I.R. Gallery and the Terry Schreiber Studio Gallery.

She is represented by Annette Fox of Fox Gallery NYC.

Website

Degree(s)

B.F.A., Tyler School of Art
M.F.A., Maryland Institute College of Art

Recent Work

Recent Exhibitions

Artists Draw Their Studios, Woodstock Byrdcliff Guild, Kleinert/James Center for the Arts, Woodstock, NY, 2021.

New Normal: Working Through Quarantine, Payne Gallery, Moravian University, Bethlehem, PA, 2021.

Chain Reaction, The Painting Center, New York 2018.

Tiny Biennale, Gallery of Art Temple University, Rome. 2018.

More Women Painting, design sublime, Miami, Fla. 2017.

Artists Choose Artists 2016, Longyear Gallery, Margaretville, NY 2016.

H2O Watercolor Traditional & Experimental, Columbia Art Center, Columbia, MD, 2015.

Art Department Faculty Exhibit , The Hewitt Gallery of Art, New York, 2015.

Retrogarde Pro-jects’, Westbeth Gallery, New York, 2014

Hallie Cohen & Jim Holl, Paintings and works on paper, Fox Gallery NYC, 2013.

Multiples, Manhattan Borough President’s Gallery, 2013.

Publications

Watercolors, drawings and photographs published in the The Huffington Post (2013-present)

The Art of Time (essay)  Infinite Instances: Studies and Images of Time. Ed. Olga Ast, Mark Batty Publisher: New York. 2011.

Featured in Faculty Focus, 71st Street Magazine, Volume 16, No. 3, Summer 2009.

Illustrator for The Nadir of My Zenith, essay by Francis Levy in Steven Heller’s Design Disasters: Great Designers, Fabulous Failure and Lessons Learned. Allworth Press, October 2008. 

Professional Experience

College Service

Chair, Art & Art History Department (2004-2017)
Director, Hewitt Gallery of Art (2013-present)

Other Professional Activities

Visiting artist for Senior Critiques, MICA, 2018.

Lotos Foundation 2016 Prize Nominator.

Visiting curator, Chashama, Brooklyn Army Terminal, 2015.

“Teaching and Creativity,” interview by videographer Oded Naaman as part of a video series on creativity for Columbia Business School , July 2015.

Location

Carson Hall, Room 700