Lee Cooper has returned to the visual arts after a hiatus of 50 years. He joined the UCLA faculty in 1969 in a highly quantitative area that anticipated the big-data era of today. Around 1974, he became a member of Workshop I.E., a cooperative artists studio on Main Street in Santa Monica, doing limited-edition prints, co-owned the Cooper Gallery on Robertson, served as Director of the UCLA Management in the Arts Program, and was the Co-Founder and first President of the Association of Arts Administration Educators. Cooper co-authored "The Arts in the Economic Life of the City," published by the American Council for the Arts. By 1979, Cooper shifted full focus to his primary academic agenda.
Photography has been a lifelong interest and activity for Cooper. With an archive of images spanning decades, he returned to printmaking in the Summer of 2022. Master printer, Eric Joseph, guided Cooper’s return to printmaking with the new digital technologies. Aside from printmaking, Cooper has recently been elected to the Board of the Los Angeles Ballet and selected as a Lazarus Member of TAG – The Artists Gallery.
Artist Statement
In 2022 I faced the empty walls of a new apartment overlooking the Atlantic in Cádiz, Spain. I asked, “What art do I want to see here every day?” The Cooper Gallery Collection displays the results. My blogs, “Where I See Beauty in the World,” “Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man,” and “Real Time Goes Too Fast,” elaborate my developing esthetic. For current photography, the interplay of shape, color, and light draws me to a point of view from which I hope to capture a fleeting moment and the fine details that fuel stories of the place in time. In my photos now, I actively look for beauty in fast changing times: dawn, the magic hour at sunset, or moon rise. These beautiful moments merit further contemplation than the changing light allows. During the process of transforming the digital image into an archival print, I enjoy learning new technologies that allow me to achieve in the print what I see on the screen. New pigment inks create luminous images, better viewed without glass.