Courttney Cooper draws large elaborate and exuberant maps from his physical and psychological experiences in Cincinnati, Ohio. Gluing together pieces of found paper from his job at a grocery store, Cooper’s obsessive drawings, rendered with ballpoint pens, map out neighborhoods in his hometown in remarkable detail. Buildings, streets, and conversations are all recorded from memory. His maps depict more than just streets and monuments, often addressing the season in which it was made, current events and projects going on locally, like the WEBN fireworks or the Taste of Cincinnati, even going back into the drawings to update them when new buildings are constructed or torn down. Cooper is always celebrating Oktoberfest in his life and in his work, you will find references to beer, balloons, pretzels, and German culture. Throughout the sprawling maps are written thoughts and phrases hidden beneath the landscape and revealed within the open white space of the paper, as noted in Matt Morris’ review on artforum.com: “But the party above belies the social tensions below: Gradually, one notices scrawled writing layered underneath Cooper’s landscapes, the text erupting in the blank passages of the streets.” Cooper’s work illustrates a sublime moment in time, attempting to understand something as complex as a city.
Courttney Cooper’s Cincinnati Map from 2011 was recently acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His solo show at Intuit: The Center for Intuit and Outsider Art in Chicago in spring of 2016 was reviewed in artforum.com and New City. His 2-person show (with Cole Carothers) at The Cincinnati Art Museum in 2013 was reviewed in CityBeat and AEQAI and he has exhibited extensively in the Greater Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky area including the Contemporary Art Center and The Carnegie Visual and Performing Arts Center, Covington, KY and is a studio resident at Visionaries + Voices, a non-profit arts organization that provides support for artists with disabilities, offering them professional studio space and that allows them to grow professionally and personally. His work at Western Exhibitions’ booth at the 2017 Outsider Art Fair was lauded in artnet and Brut Force. Cooper is the recipient of a 2015 Wyn Newhouse award and his work is included in a number of private and public collections including MOMA, The Cincinnati Art Museum and The Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft. He is represented by Western Exhibitions, Chicago.
https://vimeo.com/39887628
http://www.disparateminds.org/blog/2016/5/7/courttney-cooper
http://westernexhibitions.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Cooper_Artforum_March2024_x.pdf