JEANE COHEN is an artist based in New York City and Maine. Her paintings are charged with immediacy, bright colors and wild vitality. They record her process of integrating perceptions, imaginal experiences and emotion into the picture plane. Seph Rodney reviewed Jeane Cohen’s recent solo show at Slag Gallery in the New York Times: “Cohen’s paintings…teach me about seeing, as a necessary act of carefully parsing out her visual abundance.” In 2022 Cohen was awarded a Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program Residency, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, and a Prison Education Teaching Fellowship at the University of Maine. She has also received awards from the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation, won first place in the Yeck Young Painters Competition, and has held residencies at Ox-Bow School of Art, Monson Arts, the City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program, and the 40th Street Artist-in-Residence Program. Cohen has exhibited at Miami University, The Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Slag Gallery, Julius Caesar Gallery, Able Baker Contemporary, Vox Populi, Flying Object, Edgewood College and many more. She received her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2018, and her BA from Hampshire College in 2011. Cohen has recently taught in the Painting and Drawing Department at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, at Maine College of Art and Design, and with the Second Chance Pell Prison Program.

The Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program awards rent-free non-living studio space to 17 visual artists for year-long residencies in DUMBO, Brooklyn. Its mission is to provide working studio space and community for artists. Artists are selected annually based on merit from a competitive pool of applicants by a professional jury comprised of artists and members of the SWSP Artists Advisory Committee.

The Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program is the new face of the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation Space Program, developed for artists, by artists in 1991. In 2014 the program was renamed the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program to honor the legacy of Marie Walsh Sharpe and reflect the new sponsorship and commitment of the Walentas Family Foundation.