Working Together: A Conversation With Mark Cooper

Studio Art Professor, Mark Cooper, was recently featured in Sculpture, A Publication of the International Sculpture Center. B. Amore, who interviewed him, says, “Mark Cooper’s sculptures seem particularly suited to the uncertain nature of our times. Like the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, Cooper “liv[es] the question” through his work, both personal and collaborative, creating visual forms that bear traces of a rich, compelling, infinitely productive, and changeable process. The pieces, which exude energy, present variations on archaic forms and seem timeless. When combined to create installations, they give a sense of continually evolving life. Cooper has worked extensively in the United States, Europe, China, and Vietnam. Collaboration with communities is one of his favorite ways of creating art. He is forever exploring new ground, and he has most recently created a three-part marble “anti-monument” for the DaNang Museum of Fine Art in Vietnam. Through this and other works, Cooper shows us that though a form may seem fixed, its associations create endless permutations in the viewer’s experience.”