Diana Cooper (artist)

Diana Cooper (born 1964) is an American visual artist, known for largely abstract, improvised hybrid constructions that combine drawing, painting, sculpture, installation and photography. Her art has evolved from canvas works centered on proliferating doodles to sprawling installations of multiplying elements and architectonic structures. Critics have described her earlier work—primarily made with craft supplies such as markers, pens, foamcore, pushpins, felt, pipe cleaners, tape and pompoms—as humble-looking yet labor-intensive, provisional and precarious, and "a high-wire act attempting to balance order and pandemonium." They note parallels to earlier abstract women artists such as Eva Hesse, Lee Bontecou, Elizabeth Murray, and Yayoi Kusama. Lilly Wei, however, identifies an "absurdist playfulness and Orwellian intimations" in Cooper's work that occupy a unique place in contemporary abstraction.

Cooper has received the Rome Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and awards from the Anonymous Was A Woman, Pollock-Krasner and Joan Mitchell foundations. She has been commissioned to create public artworks for New York City and the Moss Arts Center at Virginia Tech, and her work has been acquired by the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the British Museum and the Pinakothek der Moderne (Munich). Cooper is based in Brooklyn, New York and is married to the scholar and essayist Mark Lilla.