Charles Cohan was born in 1960. He received a BFA in printmaking in 1985 from the California College of Arts and Crafts (now California College of the Arts, Bay area CA) and an MFA in printmaking from Cranbrook Academy of Art (Bloomfield Hills MI) in 1988. Working at Semrau Graphics in Berkeley, CA as a production screen printer during his undergraduate studies at CCAC, he subsequently printed for students in the graphic design program at Cranbrook during graduate school. Throughout his latter academic studies he worked for master lithographer Kent Lovelace at Stone Press Editions in Seattle, most notably as assistant printer for the production of two editions by artist Jacob Lawrence. He printed for legendary lithographer William Walmsley in Tallahassee, FL through the early nineties. (https://hawaii.edu/art/charlie-cohan/).
After teaching at Florida State University and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, he became a professor in the Art Department at the University of Hawaiʻi where he worked from 1994-2025. He taught a wide range of printmaking methods. At various times Cohan was Printmaking program chair and Graduate chair. Teaching residencies since 2000 include the Whanganui Polytechnic in New Zealand, the University of Georgia Study Abroad Program in Italy, the Pilchuck Glass School, Rochester Institute of Technology, Pyramid Atlantic Arts Center, Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Canberra Glassworks and Megalo Print Studio, and the University of South Australia. (https://hawaii.edu/art/charlie-cohan/). Cohan was always involved in printmaking nationwide. He was curator of the print collection of the Pilchuck Glass School, coordinator of the collaborative printing venture Arm and Roller Press, and co-founder/director of the experimental printmaking group Lithopixel Refactory Collective [LRC]. (https://hawaii.edu/art/charlie-cohan/).
Throughout his career, Cohan’s art was in many exhibitions in the U.S. and other countries, in group and solo shows. In the 2020s, Cohan had several international solo exhibitions – in Aotearoa, Australia, Japan and South Korea.
He himself had an extensive collection of prints, largely from portfolio exchanges, common among printmakers. In 2008, the University of Hawaiʻi Art Gallery featured a selection of these outstanding prints collected between 1993 and 1998 in the exhibition The Commodity of Exchange: Prints from the Charles Cohan Collection. On view were 150 prints from five exchange portfolios.
In 2024, Cohan co-curated an exhibition at the John Young Gallery (University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa) of prints from his collection. The exhibit consisted of prints by fellow printmakers, printers’ proofs produced by Cohan’s Arm and Roller Press, international collaborative exchange portfolios, artists’ books, and zines. (https://hawaii.edu/art/gallery-walkthrough-conversation-cohan-copy/)
He was awarded the Hawaiʻi State Foundation on Culture and the Arts Individual Artist Fellowship for 2000. A solo exhibition of his prints entitled Sequence and Equation was presented in 2000 at the Contemporary Museum at First Hawaiian Center in Honolulu. He was recently awarded the Roselle Davenport Award for Artistic Excellence in the Artists of Hawaiʻi 50th Annual Exhibition. He has served as President of the American Print Alliance, The Honolulu Printmakers, and as a board member for the Southern Graphics Council. (https://buttersgallery.com/Artist-Info.cfm?ArtistsID=362&Object+). He has received many other grants and awards.
In a 2018 interview on Hawaiʻi Public Radio, (https://www.hawaiipublicradio.org/arts-culture/2018-01-02/charles-cohan-choosing-adversity) Cohan said:
“I’m a printmaker. I’m an old school dyed in the wool, dirty fingered, gnarly hangnail printmaker. I don’t do any digital work, I don’t do any photography. All very physical, rough and tough, old school macho processes where you have to expend energy and weight and pressure and all these things. Work that’s too clean to me, this is not a value judgment, is clean. To me in a sense it needs to be roughened up a little bit or it needs to be bounced around, or pushed around a little bit. It needs to be pulled and torqued, twisted, if not trashed. To me as a maker, it may sound cliché, but it’s the hand making, the hand making of something. Not to say that digital images are not handmade or photographs are not handmade, it’s a different type of making. Unless I’m getting my hands dirty, unless I’m getting blisters, unless I’m getting physically engaged with the materiality and the process on a level where there is stress and strain and pressure and staining, blistering, I don’t really feel like I’m making anything. I need that resistance, I need that physical nature of things.
