BARBARA E. COHEN
summer’s end-RED
November 19-29, 2026
@ Tillies Art & Provisions, 512 Commercial Street, Provincetown, MA
Opening reception: Friday, November 20, 6-8pm, with Music by Ken Fields and Sue Goldberg:
Tillies Art & Provisions in Provincetown is pleased to present Summer’s End-RED, an exhibition of work by Barbara E. Cohen. Curated by Farm Projects director Susie Nielsen as a joint project with the artist, the show features a new series of abstracted paintings of a folding beach chair, alongside past work that also use red, highlighting a continuous thread in her work. Summer’s End-RED opens with reception, Friday, November 20, from 6 to 8pm, with live jazz by Ken Field and Sue Goldberg.
The series began with a single object: a red beach chair Cohen ordered online at the start of the summer. Its seat was a deep cranberry red with pink and orange, with a toothy texture she immediately wanted to paint on, held in metal curves that struck her as "a sculpture in and of itself."
After years of moving, Cohen had finally settled into a year-round home on the water in Provincetown's East End. "I truly did rest from all the past years of moving and travel," she says. Rest soon turned into play, leading her to develop this series, which speaks to her process and love of material and paint. Folding the chair each evening, Cohen began to turn it, top to bottom, side to side, open and closed. She photographed each position with her Fuji instant camera, then manipulated each photo with oil paint before enlarging the images onto 10x10-inch wooden panels stretched with old sailcloth from Tortola in the British Virgin Islands. Because the panels had been painted on for years, earlier layers of color push through the weathered sailcloth, giving each work a history beneath its surface. The result is an array of images and markings in which a familiar object loosens into abstraction. As Cohen describes, “The abstraction happens, and all becomes different: form, size, meaning, and material.”
The transformation of common objects, from this chair to a shoe and a Venetian sling, is a recurring theme in Cohen’s work, as is the use of instant photographs as part of this process. For instance, her book, Our Provincetown (Provincetown Arts Press, 2021) paired sixty stories by Provincetown writers with her painted Fuji instant photographs. Summer’s End-RED follows her exhibition at Farm Projects in Wellfleet this past June and continues her involvement with Tillies, where she has curated exhibitions since May.
About the Artist Barbara E. Cohen lives and works in New York and Provincetown, MA. She received her BFA from Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston with earlier studies in art history at Oxford University. Cohen is a multi-media artist whose artistic work spans five decades. A simplification of her continuous design of the square has recently been edited as floating cube/s in gouache on paper. Cohen is currently exploring “Habitation” of our land, housing, and distribution of property. Barbara has exhibited her paintings and sculptures in numerous galleries and museums across the country.
She has received numerous grants including the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, Artists Foundation Mass Fellowship Program Grant, Polaroid Artist Support Program Grant, Blanche E. Colman Award Grant and a grant from the Cambridge and Massachusetts Arts Councils. Residencies include the Emily Harvey Foundation in Venice, Italy, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Skopelos Island, Greece and Cyclades Residence on Paros Island Greece, 2024.