Steven Litt, "The Amazing Brilliance of the Doodles of Diana Cooper," The Cleveland Plain Dealer, October 14, 2007

"All Our Wandering,'' a site-specific installation created by Diana Cooper for the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, combines stark, minimalist geometry and wild, over-the-top doodles as a form of surface decoration on the interior.... Her over-the-top imagery brings to mind man's inability to control the technology he has created -- a time-honored theme from Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" to Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey."

The works resemble machines run amok, a bomb blast frozen in midexplosion, a fallen skyscraper slathered with tattoos on its interior. They cantilever from the gallery walls with airy lattices that subdivide space and envelop the viewer in their embrace.... Cooper's work fills the museum's galleries with a contagious and frenetic visual energy. She combines a wide-eyed sense of wonder with a desire to overwhelm the viewer with her energy and enthusiasm.

Click to read full article.

Acclaimed New York artist Diana Cooper has spent an unprecedented 33 days in residency at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland in preparation for her first solo museum exhibition, "Beyond the Line: The Art of Diana Cooper."

Occupying the bulk (more than 7,500 square feet) of the museum's gallery space, Cooper's show opens with a reception at 7 p.m. today, preceded by a public dialogue from 5:30 to 7 between Cooper and prominent author and art critic Barbara Pollack. Both events are free.

Cooper arrived in Cleveland at the end of August, ready to begin mounting her most ambitious exhibition. With huge wooden crates and the components of her intricate installations still strewn about the museum's galleries, I spoke with her about her process and a few of the many varied issues with which she grapples.

Click to read full article.

Andrea K. Scott, "Burgeoning Geometries," The New York Times, January 10, 2007

Slow is beautiful. That could be the motto of the six artists (Diana Cooper, Tara Donovan, Charles Goldman, Jason Rogenes, Jane South and Phoebe Washburn) in this spirited, if uneven, show organized by Apsara DiQuinzio, a curatorial associate at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. All favor a time-intensive, process-oriented approach in 10 hybrid works — 11, counting Mr. Goldman’s MySpace page, cited on the checklist — tha traverse painting, drawing, sculpture and installation.

The unifying thread is a kind of magpie postminimalism, which invigorates familiar abstract strategies — grids, serial repetition, reductive forms — using materials scavenged from everyday life. A short list includes woodchips, oil drums, straight pins, electrical cords and live snails. The best works rely on recycled ingredients, Dumpster-diving their way to a sustainable art.

The Whitney’s Altria branch, a modest gallery and a sprawling public atrium, is an architectural Jekyll and Hyde. The maniacal side wins out here in a pair of visionary large-scale installations by Mr. Rogenes and Ms. Washburn that bookend the sculpture court. (An underwhelming selection of bucket-based objects by Mr. Goldman is also displayed.)

An ingenious composite of Brancusi’s “Endless Column,” Dan Flavin’s fluorescence, and pyramid power, Mr. Rogenes’s 40-foot-high construction pairs an illuminated totem pole of found polystyrene packaging with a cardboard construction that recalls the modular polygons of Buckminster Fuller. Ms. Washburn’s ambitious structure, modestly titled “A Minor In-House Brain Storm,” is a winningly ramshackle, self-contained ecosystem, complete with aquatic plants (and the snails). By contrast, the sparse trio of works inside the gallery looks staid. Ms. Donovan’s shimmering cube of straight pins lacks menace, and Ms. South’s verdigris-colored cut- and-folded paper relief appears diagrammatic. Only Ms. Cooper’s wall-work — a viral concoction of vinyl, paper, felt and ink — surprises as it sprouts from itself around a column like a cartoon spore.