For more than thirty years, Mark Cohen’s career was in graphic design, marketing and visual communications. Then, he turned to painting and printmaking, addressing war, injustice and violence in our nation and around the world. Cohen draws on an expansive visual archive to create intense, psychologically charged works that explore societal issues, including racism, police brutality, gun violence and mass shootings, referencing art history and current affairs. Cohen hopes his work makes us all “question power of all kinds.”

Cohen’s paintings are large scale works on unframed canvas. "We're All Wearing Masks, Now", his most recent body of work, portraying health care workers, heroes on the front line during the Covid-19 Pandemic, wearing protective masks, was shown at the Armory Art Center in West Palm Beach. Ten of these paintings were then exhibited at Tampa General Hospital. A hand-numbered and signed archival print of one of the paintings was produced for the TGH Foundation. One of these paintings iwll be shown in Lake City ArtFields Collective, South Carolina in April, 2022.

Cohen’s work was also included in “Ripped From the Headlines” at the Projects/ FATVillage, Fort Lauderdale, 2019, where he showed paintings from his Black Lives Matter series, and on gun violence and violence related to white supremacy.

Another powerful body of work “A Legacy to Remember”, was shown at the Holocaust Documentation and Education center in Dania Beach in 2019. An encore exhibition is there currently through December. These paintings will be shown at Florida International University in Miami, opening January 24th.

Mark Cohen is also an educator, teaching painting and printmaking at the Armory Art Center and art appreciation at Palm Beach State College.