Eileen Cowin (born 1947) is a Los Angeles-based artist known for photography, video and mixed-media installations that draw on the language of mass media and art history and explore the relationship between narrative, fiction and non-fiction, memory and experience.Drohojowska-Philp, Hunter
"Eileen Cowin Papers,"
''Archives of American Art Journal'', Spring 2016, p. 86-87. Retrieved June 27, 2019.McGovern, Thomas. "Still (And More to Come)," ''Afterimage'', May/June 2000.Knight, Christopher. "Revealing More Than Meets the Eye," ''Los Angeles Times'', January 29, 2000. Associated with the 1970s Los Angeles experimental photography scene and the Pictures Generation artists, her work combines familiar human situations and carefully chosen gestures, expressions and props to create enigmatic images whose implied, open-ended stories viewers must complete.Heartney, Eleanor. "Eileen Cowin at Jayne H. Baum," ''Art in America'', April 1989.Durant, Mark Alice
"Eileen Cowin"
in ''Still (and all) Eileen Cowin 1971-1998'', Pasadena, CA: Armory Center for the Arts, 2000).Zellen, Jody, "Double Take: Narrative Interventions in Photography," ''Afterimage'', March 2012. Cowin has exhibited in more than forty solo shows in the United States and abroad, including at the

Los Angeles County Museum of Art The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is an art museum located on Wilshire Boulevard in the Miracle Mile, Los Angeles, California, Miracle Mile vicinity of Los Angeles. LACMA is on Museum Row, adjacent to the La Brea Tar Pits (George C. Pa ...

(LACMA),

Museum of Contemporary Photography The Museum of Contemporary Photography (MoCP) was founded in 1976 by Columbia College Chicago as the successor to the Chicago Center for Contemporary Photography. The museum houses a permanent collection as well as the Midwest Photographers Project ...

Armory Center for the Arts The Armory Center for the Arts, also known as the Armory, is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit visual arts organization located in Pasadena, California. The Armory provides community arts education programs for all ages and exhibitions of contemporary art, mo ...

and

Contemporary Arts Center The Contemporary Arts Center (CAC) is a contemporary art museum in Cincinnati, Ohio and one of the first contemporary art institutions in the United States. The CAC is a non-collecting museum that focuses on new developments in painting, sculptur ...

.Smithsonian Archives of American Art
"Eileen Cowin papers, 1961-2015,"
Collections. Retrieved June 27, 2019.Museum of Contemporary Photography
"Eileen Cowin,"
People. Retrieved June 27, 2019.Armory Center for the Arts. ''Still (and all) Eileen Cowin 1971-1998'', Pasadena, CA: Armory Center for the Arts, 2000). Her work is included in more than forty institutional collections, including LACMA,Los Angeles County Museum of Art
"Eileen Cowin,"
Collections. Retrieved June 27, 2019. the

J. Paul Getty Museum The J. Paul Getty Museum, commonly referred to as the Getty, is an art museum in Los Angeles, California housed on two campuses: the Getty Center and Getty Villa. The Getty Center is located in the Brentwood, Los Angeles, Brentwood neighborhood ...

,J. Paul Getty Museum
"Eileen Cowin,"
Artists, Collection. Retrieved June 27, 2019.

Brooklyn Museum The Brooklyn Museum is an art museum located in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. At , the museum is New York City's second largest and contains an art collection with around 1.5 million objects. Located near the Prospect Heights, Crown H ...

Art Institute of Chicago The Art Institute of Chicago in Chicago's Grant Park, founded in 1879, is one of the oldest and largest art museums in the world. Recognized for its curatorial efforts and popularity among visitors, the museum hosts approximately 1.5 mill ...

,Art Institute of Chicago
"Eileen Cowin,"
Artists. Retrieved June 27, 2019.

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) is a modern and contemporary art museum located in San Francisco, California. A nonprofit organization, SFMOMA holds an internationally recognized collection of modern and contemporary art, and was ...

(SFMOMA),San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Eileen Cowin,"
Artists. Retrieved June 27, 2019. and

Smithsonian American Art Museum The Smithsonian American Art Museum (commonly known as SAAM, and formerly the National Museum of American Art) is a museum in Washington, D.C., part of the Smithsonian Institution. Together with its branch museum, the Renwick Gallery, SAAM holds o ...

.Smithsonian American Art Museum
"Eileen Cowin,"
Artists. Retrieved June 27, 2019. She has been recognized with awards and commissions from the

National Endowment for the Arts The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) is an independent agency of the United States federal government that offers support and funding for projects exhibiting artistic excellence. It was created in 1965 as an independent agency of the federal ...

, LACMA, the City of Los Angeles (COLA),

Public Art Fund Public Art Fund is an independent, non-profit arts organization founded in 1977 by Doris Freedman, Doris C. Freedman. The organization presents contemporary art in New York City's public spaces through a series of highly visible artists' projects, n ...

(New York), and the Sundance and

USA The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territori ...

film festivals.Wilson, William
"'COLA' Puts Spotlight on Local Winners,"
''Los Angeles Times'', May 8, 1998. Retrieved June 27, 2019.Public Art Fund
"''Untitled'', Eileen Cowin,"
Exhibitions. Retrieved June 27, 2019.Los Angeles Artworks
"Justice, Advocacy and Art,"
Artists, 2013. Retrieved June 27, 2019. ''New York Times'' critic Andy Grundberg wrote that her multi-image work "sets up a tension between the familiar and the mysterious, creating a climate of implied danger, sexual intrigue and violence" in which clues abound to intimate various narratives.Grundberg, Andy

''The New York Times'', August 17, 1990. Retrieved June 27, 2019. Jody Zellen observed that Cowin "manipulates the conventions of photography, film, and video to tell a different kind of story—one that explores where truth and fiction merge, yet presents no conclusions. Cowin's work provokes."Zellen, Jody
"Eileen Cowin,"
''Artscene'', April 2000. Retrieved June 27, 2019.

Life and career

Cowin was born in Brooklyn, New York and attended

State University of New York at New Paltz The State University of New York at New Paltz (SUNY New Paltz or New Paltz) is a public university in New Paltz, New York. It traces its origins to the New Paltz Classical School, a secondary institution founded in 1828 and reorganized as an a ...

(BS, 1968), where artist and professor Robert Schuler was a key influence.Wasonoredjo, Erika
"Eileen Cowin,"
Golden Age of New Paltz, Wired Gallery, 2017. Retrieved June 27, 2019. She continued her studies at

IIT Institute of Design Institute of Design (ID) at the Illinois Institute of Technology (Illinois Tech), founded as the New Bauhaus, is a graduate school teaching systemic, human-centered design. History The Institute of Design at Illinois Tech is a school of design ...

in Chicago, (MS, Photography, 1970) with modernist photographers

Aaron Siskind Aaron Siskind (December 4, 1903 – February 8, 1991) was an American photographer whose work focuses on the details of things, presented as flat surfaces to create a new image independent of the original subject. He was closely involved with, if ...

and Arthur Siegel.Grundberg, Andy
"Photography,"
''The New York Times'', December 8, 2002. Retrieved June 27, 2019. Cowin exhibited during and just after graduate school, including group shows at the

Museum of Modern Art The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It plays a major role in developing and collecting modern art, and is often identified as one of ...

Philadelphia Museum of Art The Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMoA) is an art museum originally chartered in 1876 for the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. The main museum building was completed in 1928 on Fairmount, a hill located at the northwest end of the Benjamin Fr ...

and

Fogg Museum The Harvard Art Museums are part of Harvard University and comprise three museums: the Fogg Museum (established in 1895), the Busch-Reisinger Museum (established in 1903), and the Arthur M. Sackler Museum (established in 1985), and four research ...

, and a solo exhibition at the Witkin Gallery in New York (1972).Museum of Modern Art
"New Museum Exhibit Includes Unique Photographs and Multiple Sculpture,"
Exhibitions, 1972. Retrieved June 27, 2019. From 1971–5, she taught photography at

Franconia College Franconia College was a small experimental liberal arts college in Franconia, New Hampshire, United States. It opened in 1963 in Dow Academy and the site of the Forest Hills Hotel on Agassiz Road, and closed in 1978, after years of declining enr ...

New Hampshire New Hampshire is a U.S. state, state in the New England region of the northeastern United States. It is bordered by Massachusetts to the south, Vermont to the west, Maine and the Gulf of Maine to the east, and the Canadian province of Quebec t ...

, before becoming a professor at

California State University, Fullerton California State University, Fullerton (CSUF or Cal State Fullerton) is a public university in Fullerton, California. With a total enrollment of more than 41,000, it has the largest student body of the 23-campus California State University (CSU) ...

in 1975, where she taught until retiring in 2008.Smithsonian Archives of American Art
"Eileen Cowin papers, 1961-2015; Teaching Files, 1974-2008"
Collections. Retrieved June 27, 2019.''VoyageLA''
"Check out Eileen Cowin’s Artwork,"
Interview, March 4, 2019. Retrieved June 27, 2019. Cowin's work quickly became associated with key postmodern and feminist currents, drawing attention on both coasts.Museum of Modern Art
"Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic Comfort,"
Exhibitions, 1991. Retrieved June 27, 2019. She had notable solo exhibitions at LACMA (1985), Museum of Contemporary Photography (1991),

Cleveland Museum of Art The Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA) is an art museum in Cleveland, Ohio, located in the Wade Park District, in the University Circle neighborhood on the city's east side. Internationally renowned for its substantial holdings of Asian and Egyptian ...

(1998), a traveling retrospective at the Amory Center for the Arts and Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati (2000), and gallery shows at OK Harris and Jayne H. Baum (New York City) and Roy Boyd Gallery (Santa Monica), among others. Her work was also included in the Whitney Biennial (1983),Larson, Kay
"All American Energy,"
''New York Magazine'', April 11, 1983, p. 61. Retrieved June 27, 2019.Grundberg, Andy

''The New York Times'', April 1, 1983. Retrieved June 27, 2019. the traveling exhibitions "Photography in California, 1945 – 1980" (SFMOMA, 1984–6)Grundberg, Andy

''The New York Times'', June 7, 1984. Retrieved June 27, 2019. and "Defining Eye: Women Photographers of the Twentieth Century" (

Saint Louis Art Museum The Saint Louis Art Museum (SLAM) is one of the principal U.S. art museums, with paintings, sculptures, cultural objects, and ancient masterpieces from all corners of the world. Its three-story building stands in Forest Park in St. Louis, Mi ...

, 1997),Gonzalez, Olivia. ''Defining Eye: Women Photographers of the Twentieth Century'', St. Louis, MO: St. Louis Art Museum, 1997. the three-person exhibition, "Narrative Interventions in Photography" (Getty Museum, 2011),J. Paul Getty Museum

"Getty Museum Presents Narrative Interventions in Photography," ''ArtDaily'', 2011. Retrieved June 27, 2019. and the survey, "Under the Big Black Sun: California Art 1974-81" (

Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA) is a contemporary art museum with two locations in greater Los Angeles, California. The main branch is located on Grand Avenue in Downtown Los Angeles, near the Walt Disney Concert Hall. MOCA's o ...

, 2011).Schimmel, Paul and Lisa Gabrielle Mark. ''Under the Big Black Sun: California Art 1974-1981'', Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2011.

Work

Cowin's work has been associated with two emerging movements of the 1970s: the Los Angeles experimental photography scene (which also included

John Divola John Divola (born 1949) is an American contemporary visual artist and educator, living in Riverside, California. He works in photography, describing himself as exploring the landscape by looking for the edge between the abstract and the specific. H ...

, Robert Heinecken and Darryl Curran) and the East Coast Pictures Generation artists. Cowin, and others such as

James Casebere James Casebere (born 1953) is an American contemporary artist and photographer living in New York and Canaan, New York. Biography Casebere, born in Lansing, Michigan, grew up outside of Detroit. He attended Michigan State University and graduated ...

Cindy Sherman Cynthia Morris Sherman (born January 19, 1954) is an American artist whose work consists primarily of photographic self-portraits, depicting herself in many different contexts and as various imagined characters. Her breakthrough work is often co ...

Laurie Simmons Laurie may refer to: Places * Laurie, Cantal, France, a commune * Laurie, Missouri, United States, a village * Laurie Island, Antarctica Music * Laurie Records, a record label * ''Laurie'' (EP), a 1992 album by Daniel Johnston * "Laurie (Stran ...

and

Jeff Wall Jeffrey Wall, Order of Canada, OC, Royal Society of Canada, RSA (born September 29, 1946) is a Canadian artist best known for his large-scale back-lit Cibachrome photographs and art history writing. Early in his career, he helped define the Van ...

, challenged the realist, documentary aesthetic of preceding photographers with explicitly fabricated images that partook in artifice and the boundlessness associated with painting and cinema;Grundberg, Andy
"Cindy Sherman: A Playful and Political Post-Modernist,"
''The New York Times'', November 22, 1981. Retrieved June 27, 2019. critics suggest their work influenced the later generation of ''

mise-en-scène ''Mise-en-scène'' (; en, "placing on stage" or "what is put into the scene") is the stage design and arrangement of actors in scenes for a theatre or film production, both in visual arts through storyboarding, visual theme, and cinematography, ...

'' photographers.Goldberg, Vicki
"The Artist Becomes a Storyteller Again,"
''The New York Times'', March 8, 1992. Retrieved June 27, 2019. While exploring media and formats from staged tableaux to multi-image, multimedia installations, Cowin's work retains a strategic and thematic consistency, combining objects, gestures, expressions, words and visual referents whose charged associations probe romantic, familial and social relationships, and themes involving public and private, truth and fiction, and the gulf between representation, the inexpressible and interpretation.Spaid, Sue. "The Impossibility of Expression," ''Still (and all) Eileen Cowin 1971-1998'', Pasadena, CA: Armory Center for the Arts, 2000.

Early work: 1969–1979

In her early career, Cowin pushed against photographic conventions, incorporating appropriated imagery and unusual techniques into her images.Curtis, Cathy

''Los Angeles Times'', March 24, 1994. Retrieved June 27, 2019. She frequently layered transparencies of her own photographs—often of domestic subjects—with war and news images from magazines or sewed seemingly unrelated images onto print surfaces, reflecting feminist concerns.Frank, Peter
"Evidence Rooms,"
''LA Weekly'', December 5, 2007. Retrieved June 27, 2019. Her

gum bichromate Gum bichromate is a 19th-century photographic printing process based on the light sensitivity of dichromates. It is capable of rendering painterly images from photographic negatives. Gum printing is traditionally a multi-layered printing process, ...

prints (1972–5) featured pale, washed-out colors that played against sensual, erotic imagery evoking the sexual liberation of the era; she multiplied the perspectives and readings of each work with layered personal symbols, cultural motifs and sewn elements. Her ''One Night Stand'' suite (1977-9) anticipated the conceptual and narrative concerns, formal rigor and emotional depth of her mature work. Shot in the flat, unaffected tones and color of the day's minimalist and non-theatrical aesthetic, these playfully sparse compositions offered fragmented clues intimating a sexual tryst: Polaroid snapshots of people disrobing tucked behind phone cords and alarm clocks, rumpled sheets, nightstands. Absence was a key theme, with the Polaroids and nightstands—both humble holders of mundane personal effects and silent witnesses to life's most intimate moments—standing in for protagonists. Her concurrent "Lady Killer" series similarly explored absence but featured a more direct, aggressive tone and aesthetic.

Photography and installations: 1980s & 1990s

In the 1980s, Cowin continued to blur fiction and non-fiction in more fully constructed, cinematic scenes—an approach now sometimes called ''mise-en-scène'' photography—taking on a directorial mode that included storyboarding, scripting, staging actors, set design and framing.Davenport, Alma
''The History of Photography: An Overview''
University of New Mexico Press, 1999. Carefully controlling eye contact, the direction of gazes, gesture, expression and props, she clustered her "sets" with charged symbols and elements in order to create multiple, contradictory readings, while alluding to timeless themes such as romance, abandonment, danger, corruption, and salvation.Johnstone, Mark, "Real Images of an Illusory World," Tokyo, Japan: Gallery Min, 1987.Price, Aleedra
"Eileen Cowin,"
Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery, Scripps College, June 28, 2010. Retrieved June 27, 2019. Her widely recognized ''Family Docudrama'' series (1980–3) featured consciously staged domestic moments that critics situated in a liminal space between soap opera and conceptual art.Hagen, Charles
"Eileen Cowin at Jayne H. Baum,"
''Artforum'', November 1991. Retrieved June 27, 2019. Shot in Cowin's home and cast with herself and family members including her twin sister, these tableaux evoked familial intimacy and tension (marital, parental, sibling and professional), as well as a sense of artifice that subtly undermined the illusion of spontaneous documentary. In several works, Cowin used doubling devices—black-and-white background images and her twin—to suggest memory, history, a ghostly or other self, and the challenges of female identity from multiple vantage points. The series' images function as stand-alone multi-layered works, and collectively, as commentary on contemporary American family life, the web of social construction, and the media's blurring of public and the private, which can distort personal moments into pathologically self-conscious "performances." In the latter 1980s, Cowin shifted toward more broadly resonant, sparsely staged images that ''The New York Times'' compared to the stylized theater work of Robert Wilson and

Peter Sellars Peter Sellars (born September 27, 1957) is an American theatre director, noted for his unique contemporary stagings of classical and contemporary operas and plays. Sellars is professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where ...

. Working with models and archetypal, symbolic gestures emerging from inky, black backgrounds, she drew, alternately, on the language of ''film noir'' (men in trench coats, women in slinky red dresses, billowing curtains, shadowed backgrounds) and Renaissance ''

tableau vivant A (; often shortened to ; plural: ), French language, French for "living picture", is a static scene containing one or more actors or models. They are stationary and silent, usually in costume, carefully posed, with props and/or scenery, and ...

'' paintings.Muchnic, Suzanne
"From the Street to the Studio,"
''Los Angeles Times'', September 1, 1982. Retrieved June 27, 2019.Curtis, Cathy

''Los Angeles Times'', July 25, 1988. Retrieved June 27, 2019.Grundberg, Andy

''The New York Times'', December 2, 1988. Retrieved June 27, 2019. The ''film noir''-ish images evoke elliptical narratives and themes of sexual tension, voyeurism, and rituals of male bonding and competition. Works such as ''Magritte'' and ''Mirror of Venus'' (1988) invoke and challenge art historical conventions such as the objectification of women or religious narratives, eschewing elaborate sets and period costumes for subtle expressions, dramatic gestures, and recognizable poses.L'Œil de la Photographie
"Encore: Reenactment in Contemporary Photography,"
Photo Events, March 20, 2019. Retrieved June 27, 2019. In the 1990s, Cowin began creating multiple-image works and installations (often mixing photography and video stills) that suggested loose, non-chronological narratives based on the interrelationships of the images and their characters and props.Wride, Tim. "Collection Highlight: Eileen Cowin’s ''Based on a True Story''," ''Los Angeles County Museum of Art Members Magazine'', October 1996. This work included, among others, a 1990 public installation commissioned for New York's Penn Station; ''Lot’s Wife'' (1991), which redressed the Biblical story in ''film noir''; the moody, six-image ''Based on a True Story'' (1993); and the ominous ''I’ll Give You Something to Cry About'' (1996), which distills the passion and dissolution of an actual or conjectured union (including the hint of domestic violence) down to a small cluster of image/memories.Harvey, Doug
"Sue Spaid; Used & Amused,"
''LA Weekly'', February 4, 2000. Retrieved June 27, 2019. Writers described the works' pared visuals as "almost calligraphic in their emotional intensity," noting how Cowin's use of alternating darkness and imagery evoked cinema, the guilty pleasure of voyeurism, memory and the unconscious.

Video, photography and public installations: 1996–

In her later work, Cowin continues to consider the relationship of narrative, gesture, expression and symbolic objects to fact, fiction and truth, often with a greater emphasis on language and sociopolitical issues.Black, Ezrha Jean
"Eileen Cowin, Glendale Community College,"
''Artillery'', July 2, 2018. Retrieved June 27, 2019. The installation, ''I See What You're Saying'' (2002/2011), explored storytelling, truth and lying with images and diptychs that juxtapose altered books with close-ups of eyes and mouths—symbols of seeing and speaking—suggesting stories that migrate from the text to more ambiguous human gestures and expressions. ''Blow Me a Kiss'' (2013), one of two public, site-themed works at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), comprised four video panels of faces blowing kisses that the ''Los Angeles Times'' called "hypnotic."Gelt, Jessica

''Los Angeles Times'', October 20, 2013. Retrieved June 27, 2019.Lenihan, Jean
"An Arts Festival at LAX. Yes, LAX,"
''LA Weekly'', October 1, 2013. Retrieved June 27, 2019. Much of Cowin's video work,Eileen Cowin website
"Videos."
Retrieved June 27, 2019. beginning with ''It Goes Without Saying'' (1996) and ''It’s So Good to See You'' (1999), paradoxically constricts the medium's most useful storytelling device—motion—in favor of stillness, suggestion, and commonplace, intimate gesture and expression.Wilson, William

''Los Angeles Times'', September 5, 1998. Retrieved June 27, 2019. ''I give you my word'' (Best Experimental Film Award, 2003 USA Film Festival), investigates memory and subjectivity with simultaneous split-screens of two people telling the story of the same event. The tightly composed, charged "Your Whole Body is a Target" (2006) explores the appropriation of gesture, self-preservation, fear and communal space, impressionistically depicting self-defense lessons that Cowin undertook in which she plays the roles of empowered and disempowered, assaulter and defender.Wood, Eve, "Eileen Cowin, Los Angeles," ''Art Papers'', March/April 2007.Frank, Peter
"Manuela Friedmann, Valerie Green, Eileen Cowin,"
''LA Weekly'', December 6, 2006. Retrieved June 27, 2019.Fringe Exhibitions

2006. Retrieved June 27, 2019. The videos in her show, ''Do Nothing Until You Hear From Me'' (2018), offered ambiguous, suspenseful, and contradictory images that investigated the apprehension and construction of reality and sociopolitical issues such as immigration. Cowin's 63-foot, photographic public mural, ''Shelf Life'' (2018, LAX), focused on objects, with a film-frame-like sequence of images of shelves containing carefully chosen books, photos and keepsakes; the interplay of text, titles and objects suggest narratives on contemporary social themes such as identity, citizenship, travel, place, and universal connection.Zellen, Jody
"Eileen Cowin, Shelf Life on the Fly at LAX,"
''Art Now LA'', October 3, 2017. Retrieved June 27, 2019.Los Angeles World Airport
"Eileen Cowin, ''Shelf Life''
Los Angeles World Airports Art Program, 2017. Retrieved June 27, 2019. Cowin's other commissioned public works include billboards for LACMA's "Made in California" show (2000) and MAK Center for Art and Architecture's "How Many Billboards?" show (2010).Los Angeles County Museum of Art
''Made in California: Art, Image, and Identity, 1900-2000"
Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2000. Retrieved June 27, 2019.California Community Foundation
"Eileen Cowin,"
Fellowship for Visual Artists, 2012. Retrieved June 27, 2019. an installation for

Los Angeles MTA The Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (LACMTA), commonly branded as Metro, LA Metro, and L.A. Metro, is the state agency that plans, operates, and coordinates funding for most of the Transportation in Los Angeles, trans ...

's inaugural Metro Rail Light Boxes project, (2001), and a 14-sequence installation for the system's Martin Luther King Jr. station (future).Broverman, Neal
"An Early Look at All the Artwork Coming to the Metro Crenshaw Line Los Angeles Magazine,"
''Los Angeles Magazine'', January 22, 2018. Retrieved June 27, 2019.Los Angeles Metro
"I see what you’re saying (train of thought), 2001"
Artworks. Retrieved June 27, 2019.

Recognition and collections

Cowin's work belongs to the permanent collections of more than 40 museums and institutions, including the LACMA,Muchnic, Suzanne

''Los Angeles Times'', July 8, 1992. Retrieved June 27, 2019. the

, Brooklyn Museum, Art Institute of Chicago, SFMOMA, Smithsonian American Art Museum,

Denver Art Museum The Denver Art Museum (DAM) is an art museum located in the Civic Center of Denver, Colorado. With encyclopedic collections of more than 70,000 diverse works from across the centuries and world, the DAM is one of the largest art museums between t ...

Hammer Museum The Hammer Museum, which is affiliated with the University of California, Los Angeles, is an art museum and cultural center known for its artist-centric and progressive array of exhibitions and public programs. Founded in 1990 by the entrepreneur- ...

, Museum of Contemporary Photography,

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH), is an art museum located in the Houston Museum District of Houston, Texas. With the recent completion of an eight-year campus redevelopment project, including the opening of the Nancy and Rich Kinder Build ...

, Museum of Modern Art,

National Gallery of Canada The National Gallery of Canada (french: Musée des beaux-arts du Canada), located in the capital city of Ottawa, Ontario, is Canada's national art museum. The museum's building takes up , with of space used for exhibiting art. It is one of the l ...

Seattle Art Museum The Seattle Art Museum (commonly known as SAM) is an art museum located in Seattle, Washington, United States. It operates three major facilities: its main museum in downtown Seattle; the Seattle Asian Art Museum (SAAM) in Volunteer Park on Cap ...

Slemmons, Rod. ''Photography in the Collection of the Seattle Art Museum'', Seattle: Seattle Art Museum, 1990. and

Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography The is an art museum concentrating on photography. As the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, it was founded by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, and is in Meguro-ku, a short walk from Ebisu station in southwest Tokyo. The museum also ...

, as well as many private collections. Her work has been included in numerous art historical books,Hitchcock, Barbara
''The Polaroid Book: Selections from the Polaroid Collections of Photography''
New York: Taschen, 2008. Retrieved June 13, 2019.Hoy, Anne
''Fabrications: Staged, Altered, and Appropriated Photographs''
New York: Abbeville Press, 1987. Retrieved June 13, 2019. monographs,Johnstone, Mark. ''Eileen Cowin'', American Contemporary Photography series, Tokyo: MIN Gallery, 1987.Muchnic, Suzanne

''Los Angeles Times'', December 20, 1987. Retrieved June 27, 2019. and catalogues,Crimp. Douglas. ''Image Scavengers'', Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1982. including ''The History of Photography: An Overview'' (1999), ''A History of Women in Photography'' (1994),Rosenblum, Naomi. ''A History of Women in Photography'', New York: Abbeville Press, 1994. and ''New American Photography'' (1985).Gauss, Kathleen. ''New American Photography'', Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1985. Cowin has received awards, grants and commissions from

Los Angeles World Airports Los Angeles World Airports (LAWA) is the airport authority that owns and operates Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) and Van Nuys Airport (VNY) for the city of Los Angeles, California. LAWA also owns and manages aviation-related property n ...

(2019–20, 2017–8, 2013), Metropolitan Transit Authority (Los Angeles, 2015–20), the City of Santa Monica (2014–5; 2012),

California Community Foundation The California Community Foundation (CCF) is a philanthropic organization located in Los Angeles, California. Foundation Center, an independent nonprofit organization, ranks it among the top 100 foundations in the nation by asset size and total ...

(2012), Center for Cultural Innovation (2011), Sundance Film Festival (2002),

California Arts Council The California Arts Council is a state agency based in Sacramento, United States. Its eight council members are appointed by the Governor and the state Legislature. The agency's mission is to advance California through arts, culture and creativi ...

(2001), LACMA (2000), City of Los Angeles (1997), Art Matters (1994), Public Art Fund, New York (1990), and National Endowment for the Arts (1990, 1982, 1979, 1974), among others.City of Los Angeles
''COLA 2009''
Department of Cultural Affairs. Retrieved June 27, 2019.

References

External links

Eileen Cowin official websiteEileen Cowin papers, 1961-2015
Smithsonian Archives of American Art
Eileen Cowin
Museum of Contemporary Photography profile
Eileen Cowin on her series I See What You're SayingEileen Cowin, ''I see what you’re saying (train of thought)'', 2001
LA Metro
Conversation with Eileen Cowin
The Getty {{DEFAULTSORT:Cowin, Eileen American women artists 21st-century American photographers Photographers from New York City American conceptual artists State University of New York at New Paltz alumni Illinois Institute of Technology alumni People from Brooklyn 1947 births Living people 21st-century American women photographers 21st-century American women