Artist Profiles

Laura Cohen

// Director of Community Arts, Baltimore Clayworks

LAURA COHEN is a licensed art educator, community artist, and Director of Community Arts at Baltimore Clayworks in Baltimore, Maryland. Their mission is: “To develop, sustain, and promote an artist-centered community that provides outstanding educational, artistic, and collaborative programs in the ceramic arts”. Baltimore Clayworks’ core values are artist-centeredness, excellence, inclusivity, integrity, and joy. As Director of Community Arts, she creates, manages, and facilitates teachers, interns, volunteers, community projects, public art installations, partnerships, and programs. Laura Cohen has a Bachelor of Science in Art Education from the University of Vermont, and holds a Master of Art in Community Arts degree from the Maryland Institute College of Art.

Website: www.baltimoreclayworks.org
Photo: Baltimore Clayworks

Interview:

Active hands-on making and reciprocal exchange between oneself and a medium engages and encourages us to be present, practice patience, and question how we see the world. Art challenges assumptions and reminds us of the importance of being present, seeing oneself and others through the limits and possibilities of working with material. The relationship one develops with a material like clay, for instance, parallels the relationships we have with others and self-care. Much like a friendship or personal, mental, emotional, and physical health, clay has to be nurtured, taken care of, checked on, has to dry slowly and carefully. If our wet clay is neglected, it will crack, but with careful attention, it can be reclaimed and turned into something else—the material forgives us but also holds us accountable. The physical process of making teaches us how to care, love, and forgive ourselves and others, increasing our capacity to love and forgive in so many circumstances.

The arts communicate many positive values to the world through making, viewing, and experiencing accountability, empathy, love, sincerity, respect, humility, openness, mastery, patience, justice, and so forth. Art encourages honest reflection about one’s humanness and place in the world.

I believe in unapologetic making—making to feel, grow, love, understand, explore, connect, reflect, and be fully human. My creative life has taken many forms—from teacher and ceramicist to performer and brewer but regardless of vehicle, it’s been about transformation, connecting with others, overcoming assumptions and combating systems of oppression through genuine interaction, access, learning, and understanding.

Art making, individually or as a group, brings folks together with equal footing —we all have the same experience with a material. The material treats you the same and one has the same experience with it—whether you are a six-year old white child or a sixty-five-year old African American woman. Art making is humbling, forgiving, and challenging. I have and continue to learn about myself and others through making.

“Art making is humbling, forgiving, and challenging. I have and continue to learn about myself and others through making.”
– Laura Cohen, Director of Community Arts, Baltimore Clayworks

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