Jim Cogswell

Jim Cogswell uses painting and drawing as the knowledge base for his artistic practice. Especially attracted to interdisciplinary projects, he has collaborated in performance works, videos, and installations with poets, dancers, musicians, composers, cosmologists, astronomers, a biostatistician, a computer science engineer, and a mechanical engineer.  The intersection of art, archaeology, and architecture has become increasingly central to his creative practice.

Cogswell was born in Japan as the child of Presbyterian missionary parents and spent the first ten years of his childhood in Shikoku, Toyohashi, and Nagoya. As an undergraduate literature major, he spent his Junior Year Abroad in the Philosophy Department at the Chinese University of Hong Kong studying Mandarin Chinese and East Asian philosophy and religion. He attributes his first inclinations to take up painting to lessons that year with a Chinese calligrapher to buffer the daily grind of memorizing characters. After college, he realized his dream of returning to Japan by arranging to fulfill his Alternative Service requirements as a Conscientious Objector teaching English language and literature at Shikoku Gakuin Daigaku in Zentsūji. Those two years were followed by a year in Kyoto where he took his first formal art classes at a community art center, studying Nihon-ga, sumi-e, and shodō.  

Cogswell's work has been exhibited internationally and can be found in numerous public collections. His vinyl window mural Enchanted Beanstalk (2011) occupies eight floors of windows on the Mott Children’s Hospital at the University of Michigan Medical Center.  Cosmogonic Tattoos (2017) was an adhesive vinyl window installation for the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology and the University of Michigan Museum of Art based entirely on objects in their collections.  Unseen Worlds (2021) is a window installation for the University of Michigan Museum of Natural History, based on scientific images of microorganisms. Vinyl Euripides (2022) is an installation for the Michael Cacoyannis Foundation in Athens, Greece, based on filmmaker Cacoyannis’ cinematic restaging of three plays by Euripides: Elektra (1962), The Trojan Women (1971), and Iphigenia (1977).  Hands, Nets, and Other Devices / Mãos, Redes e Outros Dispositivos (2022) was an installation and exhibition for the International Museum of Contemporary Sculpture in Santo Tirso, Portugal. Cogswell has twice been selected as a Faculty Fellow at the U-M Institute for the Humanities and in 2014 was elected a Senior Fellow in the Michigan Society of Fellows.