1955 | Oil on canvas

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’s canvases convey how life can be stranger than fiction. Reality and fantasy blur in her works, and her dreams become lived experiences in her painterly output. Cook is also an accomplished poet whose verses have been published in numerous journals. Indeed, her poetry and painting practices often cross-pollinate. In the 1950s, Cook lived two blocks from Marcel Duchamp and Franz Kline and became embedded in the Tenth Street co-operative gallery scene. While she was drawn to representation—and particularly the output of her contemporary, Alice Neel—Cook became part of the Abstract Expressionist movement that dominated New York at the time. She developed her own eccentric style defined by mushrooming organic shapes in vivid earth tones. Ranging from the intimate to the epic, her early paintings evoke natural elements and landscapes. Yet the compositional dynamics between Cook’s abstract forms are otherworldly. Her feathered marks whirl toward a central point.