Cohen's first solo museum exhibition was initiated by
James Harithas at the
Everson Museum of Art in 1974. She began exhibiting regularly in New York City at the Max Hutchinson Gallery in 1976. Cohen exhibited widely from the late eighties onward, in New York City at the
Holly Solomon Gallery, and Wolff Gallery. In the early nineties she began exhibiting in Europe. In 2008, her exhibition
Come in a Little Closer at Michael Steinberg Fine Art received wide attention. It was written about in
The New York Times, artcritical.com, and reviewed in depth in
The Brooklyn Rail by Joan Waltemath who wrote, "her brushstrokes...hover between the task of delineating form and the state of becoming form. They mimic the fluctuation between being and reflecting on being and so embody the
Cartesian dualism that determines our consciousness." The first exhibition of Cohen's altered x rays, her works on exposed x ray films in which cuts and other interventions subvert or enhance the image, was held at The Field Institute Hombroich,
Museum Insel Hombroich, Neuss in 2011. In 2013,
The Responsibility of Forms, an exhibition of Cohen's 2012-13 paintings that examine a place between uncertainty and sureness was held at Guided by Invoices, New York. It was written about extensively, in artcritical.com,
The Huffington Post and
The Brooklyn Rail. and
Season Review 2013, at Edward Thorp Gallery, New York with
Andrew Guenther,
June Leaf, and
Henri Michaux. Cohen was the recipient of awards from the
Yaddo Foundation (1982), the
National Endowment for the Arts (1987), the
New York Foundation for the Arts (1989), the
Pollock-Krasner Foundation (1998), the
Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation (1990, 2006), the
Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation Space Program (2008), and the
Edward F. Albee Foundation Residency (2009). Her painting, Curtain, 2008, 75 x 103” (190.5 x 261.62 cm) received a purchase award from the
American Academy of Arts and Letters (2012), and she was the recipient of a
John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2013). Cohen was a frequent guest teacher and lecturer at various institutions including
The School of the Art Institute of Chicago,
Columbia University School of the Arts,
Maryland Institute College of Art, and
Medicine Hat College, Alberta. ==Personal life and death==