Barnett Cohen shapeshifts between poet, performance maker, painter, and political activist. Born in South Africa, Cohen grew up in Georgia, and now lives between Los Angeles and New York. Throughout his multidisciplinary practice, Cohen proposes a kaleidoscopic queer surrealism of futuristic theoretical concepts, engaging bodily shapes, and calls for subversive action. Frequently collapsing borders between genres and mediums, Cohen documents and synthesizes our current reality of ruined meaning, anxious forces, and unremitting violence within dominant ideologies. His work mirrors a frenetic sense of ever-present discord. He has presented work at the Institute of Contemporary Art, JOAN, LAXART, 356 Mission, Human Resources, The Box, and REDCAT (Los Angeles), The International Center of Photography, JDJ, International Objects, The Exponential Festival, The Center For Performance Research (New York), City Limits (Oakland), The Onassis Foundation (Athens, GR), and Rupert (Vilnius, LT.) In 2021, Open Space/SFMOMA published a collection of his poems alongside those of artist and collaborator Simone Forti. Cohen has been in-residence at Skowhegan, MacDowell, NARS, and Rupert. He is a recent grant recipient from The Foundation For Contemporary Arts, and was nominated for the Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant in 2020. His work has been reviewed and featured in The New Yorker, The New York Times, T Magazine, Artforum, hyperallergic, Cultured and Riting among others. In 2017, Cohen founded the Mutual Aid Immigration Network (MAIN), a trilingual free assistance hotline for people detained in immigration detention centers across the United States. MAIN connects people who call with bond funds and legal services that can accelerate their freedom from incarceration.
