Now you feel how nothing clings to you (Pond)
2011
West Orange, New Jersey
Cicely Cottingham’s childhood in a New Jersey farmhouse surrounded by woods is the primary force behind her work. That experience engendered her peculiar relationship to the landscape and continues to do so. Born in Brooklyn, NY, Cottingham received a BFA degree from Pratt Institute, where she studied with Jacob Lawrence and Philip Pearlstein. She has received a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, three New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowships, a Rutgers Center for Innovative Print and Paper Fellowship, and a Hereward Lester Cooke Grant. Her work is in the collections of the Newark Museum of Art, the Institute for Jazz Studies | Rutgers University-Newark, Newark Public Library Special Collections, Montclair Art Museum, Noyes Museum of Art, and the State University of New York, Geneseo. Her work has been written about in The New York Times, New Art Examiner, Review, and Artnet Magazine.
Painters & Sculptors Grant, 2011
My touchstone is the phenomenological world. Brief but intense encounters with beauty in the landscape, that stay with me, inspire me to paint.”