Cook became a member of the Phoenix, Camino, and Feiner galleries, presenting her work in four solo exhibitions as well as numerous group shows in the 1950s. She was also elected to join “The Club” that included Kline, Willem de Kooning, and Robert Motherwell, among other giants. Despite such recognition, Cook found the emphasis on critic Clement Greenberg’s formal principles to be limiting. Her peers advised Cook to use less color and avoid painting to the edge of her supports. By the late 1960s, she had grown restless with the reign of the New York School. “They would talk about whether there was a new academy,” Cook explained. “They were it and didn’t know it. I felt Abstract Expressionism was for me a dead end. It was too narrow. Everyone had to work in the same way.”

Cook returned to Western New York, earning an MA in American Studies from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1971. Another genre crept into her practice: geometric abstraction. She began making hard-edge compositions with blocks of color. According to Cook, “There has to be tension. You have to wind up a painting almost with a key.” Indeed, there is a psychological intensity to the relationships between her triangles, circles, and rectangles.

Eschewing Greenbergian dogma, these geometric shapes are not purely formal but rather symbolic. They are hieroglyphs in a language that can be decoded. For example, The Bird Who Died from Sleeping Too Much (1967) emerged from a dream that a friend, Carol Hope, once shared with Cook. Here, a deconstructed black bird appears in a coffin at the top, followed by a flash of rage rendered as a bright reddish-orange horizon line, and then an engulfing depressive darkness beneath. Other more lighthearted examples from this body of work convey flowers, rainbows, and flags.

Cook’s abstractions not only set the stage for her later representational pieces, but also appear illustrated within them. As a writer, Cook had always gravitated towards narrative—and so her practice naturally transitioned to portraiture and still life. Starting in 1965, Cook began creating sensational folk tableaus of figures, animals, and objects. They teem with marks, vines, flora, and other patterns that even spill out onto the frames themselves. Cook has frequently portrayed herself, her pets, and members of her community. Her late cat, Liver, and her husband, Bob Fisk, recur in her oeuvre that is at once autobiographical and allegorical. Characters hovering above the ground signify those who are disassociated from their environments. Tables overflowing with food—yet missing silverware for consuming it—represent the nourishment of recognition that is too often withheld from artists.

About the artist

A fixture of the art community in Western New York, Sally Cook (b. 1932, Buffalo, NY) is a painter and poet who captures the absurdity and whimsy of ordinary life. While Cook was a significant figure in the postwar New York art scene, her figurative canvases—which resonate with those of canonical artists ranging from Florine Stettheimer to Frida Kahlo—have flown under the radar outside of Buffalo. The artist’s fantastical approach to portraiture and still life reflects her incisive and witty observations of the world.  

Cook attended the Albright Art School in Buffalo in the mid-1950s, where she trained with painters such as Seymour Drumlevitch and Peter Busa—the latter of whom encouraged her move to downtown New York. Cook took up residence on the Bowery and immersed herself in the historic Tenth Street co-operative gallery scene. While she was always drawn to figuration, Cook became part of the Abstract Expressionist movement that reigned in New York City. The painter developed her own abstract style defined by mushrooming amorphous forms of vivid natural color. She became a member of the Camino, Phoenix, and Feiner galleries, presenting her work in solo exhibitions as well as group shows with the likes of Willem de Kooning, Alice Neel, and Franz Kline. Cook was also elected to join the legendary Artists’ Club established by de Kooning, Kline, and Hans Hoffman.