Mary D. Cohen (1929-2020)

Mary D. Cohen (1929-2020) was a protean woman whose talents included expertise in literature and editing, entomology, museum patronage, design, and ceramics. She and her husband Harold moved to Buffalo in 1974 when he became Dean of the School of Architectural Planning and Design at SUNY Buffalo. In this new environment, Mary took up ceramics. The Cohens are “scientist-collectors and impassioned aesthetes,” wrote Linda Levine in 2001, describing their wide-ranging professional and personal accomplishments. Together they designed the Hall of Insects in the Buffalo Museum of Science, which provided an insect-eye view with huge specimens not unlike the perspective Charles Burchfield adopted for several summer paintings. You literally felt like you walked into another world, shrunken to the scale of a cricket.

About Mary’s ceramics Ms. Levine wrote, “The forms of her pots show an Asian simplicity, the glazes are quiet with subtle shadings.” These qualities are evident in the example that her friend Annette Cravens, another world traveler and collector, donated to the Burchfield Penney Art Center.