Marie Cosindas American, 1923-2017

Now re-emerging as a cult figure, Marie Cosindas (1923 - 2017) first gained recognition in the 1960s. Cosindas was instrumental in the recognition of color photography as an acceptable artistic medium in an era where color was relegated to commercial and amateur ventures. Both an historical exception and a product of her times, Cosindas' warm, intimate portraits, as well as her evocative arrangements separated her from the prevailing trends of Pop Art's irony and Minimalism's rigor that pervaded in the art world. Cosindas fills her tiny polaroid compositions with found or borrowed objects: flowers, figurines, perfume bottles, that came to define her signature style of excess, delightfully bordering on kitsch. 

Born in Boston in 1925, Cosindas studied at the Modern School of Fashion Design and attended evening drawing and painting classes in the Boston Museum School. During a trip to Greece in 1959, Cosindas realized that the photographs she was taking and using as models for her paintings could stand on their own as finished products. Shortly after, photographer Ansel Adams recommended her to the Polaroid Corporation, which sought to test a new instant-developing color film. Cosindas' photographs were a success, and by the end of the 1960s, she received a Guggenheim grant to continue her work in color, a Rockefeller grant, and honorary degrees from Philadelphia Moore College of Art and the Art Institute of Boston. 

In 2013, Marie Cosindas had a retrospective at the Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth. In addition to her first solo shows presented at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Museum of Fine Art in Boston (MFA Boston) in 1966, and her participation in John Szarkowski's 1978 landmark exhibition, Mirrors and Windows, at MoMa. Other major exhibitions of Cosindas' work have been held at the Art Institute in Chicago, the International Center of Photography in New York, and the Fine Arts Museum in San Francisco. 

Marie Cosindas is represented in prominent collections including the George Eastman House, Rochester NY, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California, the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, and the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.