Art Under Empire: Barnett Cohen

The Art Under Empire series explores the importance of staying engaged with our artistic/creative endeavors in these precarious times, and why art matters now more than ever! Each featured radical creative answers the same ten questions about the intersection of art, politics and the personal, sharing insights on how and why they stick with it...and why you should, too.

1. Name, pronouns, location, creative medium

Barnett Cohen, any/all, Brooklyn, visual artist.

2. Why is art important during times of political upheaval/community in crisis?

Art is to commune and to commune is to survive, especially in crisis. Even in extreme, during a genocide, in Gaza, across Palestine, artists persevere in this necessity. I am thinking of a You Must Live: New Poetry from Palestine, a collection of work by Palestinian poets writing now, out this September from Copper Canyon Press. Communing is, for me, both a solo endeavor and community labor. At my desk, alone, when I compose scores for my performances, I am channeling the language of others in my own. In the rehearsal room, when I collaborate with the performers who populate my pieces, we collectively summon the range of movement lineages they embody. To commune is to synthesize what it feels like to live through crisis even if a particular crisis is not yet upon us personally. I am reminded of the book Red Flag Warning: Mutual Aid and Survival in California’s Fire Country that you co-edited with Margaret Elysia Garcia, how you gathered writers to make sense of our new era of megafires. Each writer had a unique spatial relationship, an individual distance, to the fires of Northern California. Some were deeply affected while others were not. Yet all were pulled to understand the fires, to survive through meaning, and offer that act outside of themselves to readers like me eager to get close to the crisis, to know it better, without getting burned.

3. What are you currently working on?

anyyywayyy whatever, a performance that premieres at Amant in New York this September. And in 2026, I have been invited to present a performance, entitled rot, at the Vilnius Biennial of Performance Art in Lithuania. Later in the year, I'll be in-residence at Callie's in Berlin where I will collaborate with four Berlin-based performers on a new piece.

4. What do you want to see more of from the art/creative world?

Lack of government funding for the arts in this country–made worse by recent cuts to the NEA–results in a scarcity of opportunity for artists no matter our medium. Between artists, this can result in a possessive relationship to resources that is antithetical to solidarity. While I appreciate this possessive relationship to resources, I wish instead for every artist, writer, and performer I know to be wildly successful because my ability to thrive as an artist is linked to theirs. If I am surrounded by artists who gatekeep capital–even social or cultural capital–any contact I have with them will ultimately diminish my practice. I am reminded here of We Do This 'Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice by Mariame Kaba and the phrase, that she attributes to her father, Moussa Kaba, a political activist in the movement for independence for Guinea, that everything worthwhile is done with others. This succinct encapsulation of interconnectedness, that we depend on each other, applies as much to artists as it does to abolitionists.