anita cooke

Anita Cooke has lived and worked as an artist and teacher in New Orleans since 1980. She has taught ceramics at Tulane University, Loyola University (New Orleans), Stephen F. Austin State University, Western Michigan University, and out of her studio in New Orleans.

Anita has always been visually attracted to, and subsequently moved emotionally by mere multitudes of objects: stacks, layers, piled bundles, large groupings of objects, filled cubicles and compartments, rows of similar or dissimilar objects and repeated patterns. Her process is one of a rhythmic, repetitive tearing, cutting and sewing together of multiples of painted canvas strips that are then layered densely together to make thickly wrought bas-relief wall constructions.

In 2005 Anita was a recipient of a Louisiana Fellowship Award and in 2017 she was honored by the New Orleans Museum of Art at the Love in the Garden patron benefit. Anita is currently working with sewing and fabric, mixed media and collage. Her work has been shown nationally and is in numerous collections throughout the United States.