melanie franklin_cohn

 

Melanie Franklin Cohn

Executive Director
Council on the Arts and Humanities for Staten Island

An online show of selected Curate NYC entries.

Scroll below to see the curator's selections. 

Melanie Franklin Cohn is Executive Director of the Council on the Arts and Humanities for Staten Island, and serves on the board of the Staten Island Not-for-Profit Association. She spent seven years at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, beginning in 1996. She has edited major publications for the New Museum of Contemporary Art; the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College; and Creative Time. She has served on the Advisory Committee for the Urban Art Program for the NYC Department of Transportation and as a juror for the 2012 Land Art Generator Initiative design competition for Freshkills Park. She has led COAHSI in receiving a 2009 Rockefeller Foundation Cultural Innovation Fund Grant and a 2010 NEA Grant.

Exhibitions she has curated include “What Passes Between” at M-Lab at Stephen Stoyanov Gallery (2010); “New York, New York, New York” at Flux Factory (2007); "Counter Culture" (2004) at the New Museum of Contemporary Art; "Club 57: Where Are You?" (2005), showing Harvey Wang's photos of the East Village from 1973-1982; and the zine and internet portions of the New Museum exhibition "alt.youth.media" (1996). Ms. Cohn received her MFA from the School of Visual Arts in 1992 and her BFA from Missouri State University in 1989. 

This online exhibition is exclusively presented at curatenyc.org.

Curatorial Statement
I originally picked about 50 artworks out of the 1552 submissions simply based on what appealed to me. I then looked at the selection to see if there were any common conceptual threads that could help narrow the selection. What surfaced was a strong refrain of the ways our man-made environments impact our personal experiences. These works share some of the stories we tell ourselves as we try to make sense of the incongruities between the worlds we come from and the worlds we find ourselves living in. They explore the ways that the building blocks of civilization--language, law, technology, landscape, architecture, media, costume--affect us as we live under their influences.