Exhibition of collage artist Marilyn Cohen's Work - Layers of Time and Memories - opens at Thomas J. Walsh Art Gallery January 22 | Press Releases

Celebrating the art (1988-2006) and life of one of the more prolific collage artists of the twentieth century, Fairfield University's Thomas J. Walsh Art Gallery at the Quick Center for the Arts announces the opening of a major retrospective exhibition, "Marilyn Cohen: Layers of Time and Memories," Thursday, Jan. 22. There will be a complimentary opening reception from 5-7 p.m. The exhibition runs through Sunday, March 8 and admission to the gallery is free. The Director's Choice lunchtime lecture on Wednesday, Feb. 4 will be devoted to the exhibition.

Dr. Diana Mille, director of the Walsh Art Gallery, describes the power of Marilyn Cohen's collage succinctly: "Cohen's collages are a multi-layered collection of diverse visual and oral histories and experiences. She has developed them organically through a finely-honed tactile creative technique that boldly fuses with her idiosyncratic sensuous process and ultimately transforms the unevenly torn fragments of brilliantly hand-dyed watercolor paper fragments into a kind of weave of the shared experiences and fragile memories that embodies her diverse and multi-generational subjects."

The exhibition includes seventy-eight of Cohen's works that comprise several facets of the artist, among them, Teach Me the Songs My Mother Sang: A Celebration of American Women; Life's a Circus; American Quilts and Family Ties.

Cohen described her creative explorations as, "the use of space in unexpected ways ... I am creating bigger-than-life faces and wall-hung 'storybooks' that move out from the wall and relate the passage of time and memory with 'faceless' portraits."

The Walsh Gallery's popular Director's Choice series - a lunchtime respite in art - devotes the entire hour on Wednesday, Feb. 4 at 12:30 p.m. to a discussion of the exhibition and Marilyn Cohen's artistic process. Dr. Mille joins artist Lewis Cohen, who is Marilyn Cohen's widower, for a walk through the exhibition. The public is invited to bring a brown-bag lunch and participate in the discussion. The Director's Choice lectures are $5.

Walsh Gallery hours are Tuesday-Saturday, 11:00 a.m.-5:00 p.m.; Sunday, 12 noon-4:00 p.m.; Closed Monday. The Gallery is also open before Quick Center events. For more information, visit fairfield.edu/quick .