Artist Talk: Liz Cohen

Hear from photographer and performance artist Liz Cohen as she discusses her artistic practice.

About the speaker:
Liz Cohen (American, b. 1973) is a photographer and performance artist whose decades-long career focuses largely on the intersections 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 a dilapidated 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 profoundly influential body of work which 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 most recent 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 which make reference to Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs of the bodybuilder Lisa Lyon. Since 2017, Cohen has been based in Arizona where she serves as Professor at the School of Art at Arizona State University, Tempe.