Eileen Cowin
Not far from the cool of Santa Monica beach is Eileen Cowin’s small studio, where she spends most of her time on photography. Panels of her work reach high against the walls. If there’s an open space, it’s soon filled with photographs.
Besides reading fiction, she doesn’t have time for much else beyond working on photography, video and mixed-media installations. “I don’t really have hobbies. I don’t know if artists have hobbies,” she says “If I’m not with friends or family, I’m just very focused on my work.”
Born in Brooklyn and raised in Queens, Cowin studied drawing and printmaking at the State University of New York at New Paltz and quickly realized her artistic limitations.
“I wasn’t very good at painting,” she admits. “Even my parents didn’t like my paintings.”
But around her junior year, she discovered photography. In a less-thanideal way.
“I had a boyfriend who was very into photography — he always had his camera — and he told me that I would never be able to learn it because it was too technical for me,” she says.
So naturally, she picked up a camera and started shooting. She fell in love with it. As her work evolved, she began fusing printmaking techniques with photographic images.
Cowin sold her first works in 1969 as a second-year master’s student at Illinois Institute of Technology. With the encouragement of a professor and few expectations, she dropped off her portfolio at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. The museum bought her work. “That was a really big deal,” she says, pausing, “because I was still in school.” Professors, she says, “really championed the male students,” who were always the first to be recommended for jobs.
But that was less of an issue in the world of photography, a medium then considered a lesser form of art. “You were more discriminated against because you were doing photography,” she says.
That never stopped her from building a burgeoning career as a successful artist and photography professor, first at the now-defunct Franconia College in New Hampshire and later at Cal State Fullerton, where she taught for 33 years before retiring in 2008.
“Now,” she says, “I have my dreamcome-true life” — the ability to dive into what she loves and pay more attention to “the extraordinariness of the ordinary” as she creates narratives from her work.
Commuters will soon see that perspective in the art she was commissioned to create for the Crenshaw/LAX Line.
Along each of the Martin Luther King Jr. station platforms, Cowin’s 14 film strips will encourage passengers to design stories for the people in them. The work combines the public with the private, fact with fiction, and gives riders — whose attention often tilts toward their phones — something to engage with.
“I thought, if I can create these little narratives that maybe people could see themselves in ... sort of an ordinariness ... that they might relate in some way to that narrative,” she says.
The scenes and worlds Cowin captured in her project feature residents she photographed along the Crenshaw corridor. In one, she pays homage to civil rights activists, and in a subtle way she references Martin Luther King Jr.
Only those who look closely will notice that one of the photo’s suited-up subjects stands in certain iconic poses of King.
And within the strip, these words: “Depart not from the path which fate has you assigned.”