Artivism - Dianna Cohen
About Dianna Cohen
Dianna Cohen is a Los Angeles-based visual artist and an exemplar of what an artivist is. She uses plastic bags as the basis for two- and three-dimension works of art. Working with plastic, taught her a good deal about its properties which have fueled her passion as an advocate against plastic pollution. Dianna Cohen also is a co-founder of the nonprofit Plastic Pollution Coalition.
Plastic Bag Art and the Ocean Plastic Crisis
Dianna Cohen is a visual artist who transforms plastic bags into fine art. By deconstructing, reshaping, and reforming discarded plastic, she creates large-scale works that call attention to plastic pollution and its impact on the ocean.
On the Women Mind the Water Artivist Series podcast, Dianna discusses three of her pieces: Funnel, Bridge, and Ocean of Plastic.
Funnel is a 25-foot-high sculpture made from more than 400 plastic bags, the minimum number of bags an American is estimated to use in one year. The piece is suspended 15 feet from the ceiling, allowing viewers to walk inside and experience the scale of the plastic waste surrounding them.
Bridge is an even larger installation, measuring 25 feet long by 11 feet high. This two-dimensional work was created for the opening launch of The Ben Maltz Gallery at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles.
Ocean of Plastic is one of Dianna’s more interactive pieces. She co-created the work with 200 K–5 students at Benjamin Franklin International School in Barcelona, Spain. Through this collaboration, students participated directly in making art that speaks to the global plastic pollution crisis.
All three pieces can be seen in the video version of the Women Mind the Water Artivist Series podcast.
Dianna believes artists have always played an important role in leading cultural change because art can reach people emotionally. She points to several contemporary artists whose work responds to plastic pollution, including Pam Longobardi, Alvaro Soler-Arpa, Susan Middleton, and Chris Jordan.
Chris Jordan’s photographs of young albatrosses are especially powerful. The birds died after being fed plastic by their parents, who mistook the plastic for food. Their bodies revealed stomachs filled with plastic items.
For Dianna, these birds are a warning about the larger crisis facing all living things.
“These birds are a metaphor to what is happening to all living things and to us. We are stuffing ourselves and our children full of plastic and chemicals that leach from plastic without even realizing it.”
Through her plastic bag art, Dianna Cohen asks viewers to confront the materials we use every day, the waste we create, and the emotional reality of the ocean plastic crisis.
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Pam Ferris-Olson (00:00): Today, on the Women Mind the Water podcast, I am speaking with Dianna Cohen, a Los Angeles based visual artist. Dianna uses plastic bags as the basis for her art, which has received high acclaim. In addition to being an artist, she is co-founder of the nonprofit Plastic Pollution Coalition. The Women Mind the Water podcast engages artists in conversation about their work, and explores their connection with the ocean. Through their stories, Women Mind the Water hopes to inspire and encourage action to protect the ocean and her creatures.
Pam Ferris-Olson (00:38): Today, I welcome Dianna Cohen to the Women Mind the Water Artivist podcast series. Dianna is both a visual artist and a model of what an artist is. She attended UCLA, where she studied biology before switching her focus to art. After graduation, Dianna worked with brown paper bags to create collages. With time, she began incorporating plastic into her work. Now she creates two and three-dimensional works of art using recycled plastic bags. Her work has been exhibited on four continents. She's become a passionate advocate against plastic pollution and is a co-founder of the nonprofit, the Plastic Pollution Coalition.
Pam Ferris-Olson (01:22): Welcome, Dianna. I am so glad you could join me on this episode of the Women Mind the Water podcast. I am looking forward to learning more about you, your art, and the passion that drives your efforts to protect the ocean and her creatures. Let's begin by talking about your journey as an artist. You started college not as an art major, but as a biologist. What was your interest in studying biology?
Dianna Cohen (01:48): Yeah. Thank you, Pam, I'm really happy to be here. My focus when I first entered college was to study science, and that was based around the fact that I loved biology and I love the biological. I love nature. I love science and I love everything from gardening to animals, and just the world around us. And when I was in junior high school, my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer, and when I was in high school, she died. And she was pretty young, she was 42, and I really recommitted myself in the sciences to wanting to pursue preventative cancer research.
Dianna Cohen (02:34): So that is why I entered college as a biology major, but I found myself, after a year in that department, meeting a lot of fellow students who would say things casually to me like, "Wow, you should become a scientific illustrator in my laboratory classes." And that made me think, well, my initial reaction to that was, well, I'm an artist and I'm a scientist. So it was tough, and I began to try to figure out how I could study both the arts and sciences together. And that was just difficult 30 years ago at UCLA because the science department is at the bottom of south campus, and the arts and the art department are at the top of north campus. So in just even trying to get into an art class, I was always covered with sweat running back and forth across the campus. I decided that I wanted to transfer to the art department because I wanted to be creative immediately, and what I saw in the sciences was that I would need to have a PhD in order to be creative.
Pam Ferris-Olson (03:49): So how did you come to work with paper bags and make them into collages?
Dianna Cohen (03:53): Well, initially I studied painting, and I consider myself a painter even with the work I continue to do now, and the collage work. I was painting, I was working with watercolors and oils, and at some point I was looking at plastic bags, which they would give you seemingly for free at the market. And I started deconstructing those and becoming fascinated by little leaves and things that were printed on them and the shapes and the forms of the bags when I would deconstruct them. And so I just began to play with them, layering them, putting them together, cutting them, creating different shapes, and I started adding a needle and thread as a drawing element to those pieces. And again, at some point, I took actually a plastic bag that I'd gotten from a homeopathic pharmacy in Belgium that had an image of, I think it was maybe a dandelion or something like that, it had an image of a plant printed on it with the name in Latin. And I felt that there was a deep irony, somehow, in printing an image of a plant onto a plastic bag.
Dianna Cohen (05:04): And I was not really thinking about what plastic was made out of. I was thinking about what brown paper was made out of, and I was assuming it was trees or plants, but at some point I combined those two things together. I combined this piece of bag that had an image of a plant printed on it, and I just had this moment where I thought this is really compelling to me, material wise. I wasn't sure why, but that's when I began incorporating plastic into the pieces, and that led me on a path to working primarily with plastic. So, I know we call it down cycling, but really what I think I'm doing is up cycling or repurposing.
Pam Ferris-Olson (05:45): So where in your process as an artist did you feel the need to co-found the Plastic Pollution Coalition? And what exactly does the Plastic Pollution Coalition do?
Dianna Cohen (05:57): Yeah, I got to a point where I had begun hearing, it felt like a lone voice in the beginning, which was Captain Charles Moore. I'm sure there were other people raising alarm about this, but for some reason, his voice caught my ear. And he founded Algalita, and he is the Captain of a catamaran that's called the Algita, and he had been traveling through and motored through part of the Great Pacific garbage patch and is somewhat credited with having named it the Great Pacific garbage patch. And so I started hearing that there was, what I imagined, what I think a lot of people imagine initially, is like an island of plastic forming out in the Pacific Ocean somewhere. And I reached out to him, and I said, "Hey, how do we clean this thing up? How do we clean it up?" And he said to me, "You can't clean it up."
Dianna Cohen (06:56): And I felt disheartened by that, but I was so new to it, and I was very enthusiastic at the time. And I said, "I don't think that you should tell people that you can't clean it up. Some kid is going to come along and figure out how to clean this thing up." And he said, "I'm just telling you, I've been looking at it for a while and you can't clean it up." And I said, "Well, is it an island?" And he said, "No, not yet. It's not an island yet. It's spread out in all of the water, in the whole water column in the different stratas of the ocean. It's on the ocean floor. We don't know how much. It's breaking apart from sun and wind, or from animals chewing on it and mistaking it for food. It's breaking into smaller, smaller bits of plastic into micro plastics."
Dianna Cohen (07:42): And he said, "We just don't really know how big of a problem this is yet, and it's spread out over 2000 square miles." So it's not like you can actually travel to a physical location, but, when you journey between Hawaii and the Western United States, you will travel through part of the Great Pacific garbage patch. You go, gosh, oh my gosh, this is a big challenge. And so in looking at all of that, and it's been a pretty steep learning curve, I met other people who were also looking at this problem, and we came together and we decided we needed to create a coalition. So we created the Plastic Pollution Coalition, this was founded, and our soft launch was basically back in 2009. We launched Plastic Pollution Coalition officially, publicly, on, I think it was October 24th of 2009.
Pam Ferris-Olson (08:44): So backing up a minute, you as an artist, how does your art speak to these issues? Can you talk about a particular piece of artwork that you have and how you as an artist express your concern?
Dianna Cohen (09:00): I mean, I would say, overall, I'm not sure that my artwork actually addresses this issue.
Pam Ferris-Olson (09:08): Okay.
Dianna Cohen (09:08): I think that for nearly 30 years, I've been making beautiful two and three dimensional pieces and installations out of plastic bags and plastic materials. That said, there are some pieces that come to mind that I think fit more cleanly into the concept of being an artivist, an activist-artist. And those would be a piece called Funnel that I made in 2001, which is about 25 feet high, and I used approximately just over 400 bags to make it, and you can walk inside of it. And it's about 10 feet in diameter, and you can walk inside and look up through it, and it's like you're looking at a kind of, I don't know, cyclone of plastic bags. And I based the number of bags that I used on the low average, that is considered when we look at how many plastic bags one person in the United States potentially uses per year. It's estimated that it's between 400 and 700, so I was being optimistic on using the low number, but it's still really daunting when you see the piece.
Dianna Cohen (10:32): Another piece I made is a piece called Bridge. The Bridge is, it's about 25 feet long by 11 feet high. It's a two dimensional piece that I show installed on a wall. I made it for the opening exhibition at the Ben Moltz Gallery at Otis, here in Westchester, in Los Angeles, Otis School of Art and Design. And that piece was really something that I made while I was traveling. I was able to fold up the different components of it, and travel with them in a bag that I carried over my shoulder. This is when you were still allowed to carry a scissor in your handbag, so prior to 2001. And, for me, that piece, and these pieces, are really about looking at combining the plastic bags in a sense as if you're making a flag, or a banner, or a map, or a roadmap, so you're combining things together. So those are the thoughts I was having when I made that piece.
Dianna Cohen (11:50): And then I think maybe one of the most artivist pieces that I made was a collaboration with 200 kindergarten through fifth graders at the Benjamin Franklin International School in Barcelona. It took a month to make the piece, and I was able to take the two fourth grade classes to see the Disney Ocean film, it had just come out at that time. But we took all the books in the library about the ocean, and sea life, and wildlife and the ocean, and around the ocean, and the kids brought in all these plastic bags that were just in drawers and in the closet, et cetera, at home. And we cut them and we sewed them and we used hot glue, and we made basically a mural that can be installed, we suspend it from the handles on the top of it.
Dianna Cohen (12:44): And that piece has traveled to countries I've never been to in the world, it went to Windhoek, Namibia, it went to El Salvador, San Salvador. It's been displayed at our oceans conference at the State Department in Washington, DC, and it's been shown as part of a plastic free island project in Kefalonia in Greece. So, that piece continues to have its own interesting life, and it was an opportunity to work with those K through fifth graders, talk with them, educate them. So all of those students understood that plastic is primarily made from oil and from fossil fuels, and to think about, and imagine, and come up with actions that they could take to live with less plastic, and actions as simple as making a commitment to use their own refillable, preferably non-plastic water bottle.
Pam Ferris-Olson (13:49): So Dianna, as I said, I think you epitomize what an artivist is. What are your thoughts about the importance for an artist in supporting efforts to address issues such as plastic pollution and climate change?
Dianna Cohen (14:05): Well, I think if we look back historically, artists have always been the culture changers who have reflected or documented what was going on culturally, from Goya to all of the incredible feminist artists and painters, and conceptual artists who I love. To, I don't know, Georgia O'Keeffe, to contemporary feminist artists. Obviously, men are also making pieces about this as well, but some artists who come to mind whose work I really value in the work that we to raise awareness about plastic pollution, and that connection as well, to climate and climate change and how it impacts human health, include Pamela Gobardi. They include Alvero Solera Arpa, who is an artist based in Catalonia, in Spain. He makes these life-sized imaginary, contemporary dinosaur sculptures out of the bones of animals, and he wires them and creates them in a way with rebar so that they look like they're running or in motion, and he fills the chest cavities with plastic pollution.
Dianna Cohen (15:36): And those pieces to me are very, very powerful. They remind me, as well, of photographs taken by Susan Middleton and Chris Jordan of dead adolescent Laysan albatross on Midway Island, who have died, and then in situ as the body decomposes, all that's left is an entire stomach or gut that was full of plastic. And this is plastic that was fed to them by the parents, lovingly, thinking that it was food, so regurgitated, fed to the babies, and the babies die with their stomachs full of plastic.
Dianna Cohen (16:17): And for me, those photographs, and then Alvero's sculptures, represent a metaphor for what we're doing to ourselves, and we don't realize. We don't realize that we are stuffing ourselves full of plastic and the chemicals that leach from plastic, bisphenols, phthalates, flame retardants, et cetera, other chemicals that stick to plastic, chemicals that are used to make plastic, the plasticizing chemicals that are added to the carbon source to manufacture it, that we just have no idea that we're doing that to ourselves. And those examples for me, are very powerful examples of how to connect with people and communicate with them on a different level. So not just telling them something, not just cerebrally, but hit them here, hit them here, in different parts of their body. Resonate with different shockers, make someone feel sick to their stomach when they see something. Evoking these kinds of emotional responses from people often are the thing that will make them change.
Pam Ferris-Olson (17:30): Right. So my last guest on the Women Mind the Water podcast was Nina Rossiter. She's an author, illustrator, and graphic designer. Nina's illustrations and books also call attention to climate change and plastic pollution. Activism is very important to her, but she has to balance her fundamental need to make a living with her passion to make a difference. How do you find a balance between working as an artist and as an activist?
Dianna Cohen (18:00): As Plastic Pollution Coalition is a full-time job for me, it really becomes how do I balance it with being able to continue to make art.
Pam Ferris-Olson (18:08): Okay.
Dianna Cohen (18:08): So I think I have the opposite problem of other artists, but you can also make conscious choices personally. You can also look at what can be done or what can be changed in your school, or in your place of work, or your business. If you create products, or package products, for foods or beverages or health products, or beauty products, or cleaning products, and you sell them to other people, you can look at ways to create a more circular economy with the packaging that you select and choose, and figure out ways to take that back to incentivize refilling it, et cetera. And we can all support and push for policy and legislation that holds producers responsible, and that works with governments and companies to create the system shift and the culture change that we need to see.
Pam Ferris-Olson (19:02): Thank you, Dianna. I was going to ask you as an ending, to offer three key things that concern you about the state of the ocean, and speak to what people can do to make a difference, but you clearly did that. I can see that this is a passion, and that you are well educated and versed in the issues related to what you call plastic crisis. So I want to thank you so much for being with me, and to speaking to the issues of great concern not only to yourself, but should be to all of us. So I hope listeners will agree that this has been a very informative talk with Dianna Cohen, a woman who is a definition of an artivist. Dianna, thank you for sharing your journey in combining art and activism. Your work as an artivist is truly inspiring.
Pam Ferris-Olson (19:59): I'd like to remind our listeners that I have been speaking with Dianna Cohen, a visual artist and co-founder of the Plastic Pollution Coalition. The Women Mind the Water Artivist podcast series can be viewed on womenmindthewater.com. An audio only version of this podcast is available on the Women Mind the Water website, on iTunes, and also on Spotify, Speecher, and Google podcasts. Women Mind the Water is grateful to Jane Rice for the song, Women of Water. All rights for the Women Mind the Water name and logo belong to Pam Ferris-Olson. This is Pam Ferris-Olson. Thank you for listening.
