Nadia Lee Cohen’s Holy Ohio Finds the Sacred in America’s Heartland
With her latest book, the British artist explores family, memory, and the iconography of everyday life.
The artist and photographer Nadia Lee Cohen has long drawn inspiration from the people and places that shaped her while growing up in the English countryside—from her Essex-born childhood babysitter to images of quintessential Britishness snapped by Martin Parr. But the 33-year-old, whose visual universe includes high-profile projects for Beyoncé and Kim Kardashian as well as artworks featured at Jeffrey Deitch and London’s National Portrait Gallery, has always harbored a deep fascination with American culture. Cohen’s latest work, Holy Ohio, turns that affection into a full-scale study of the country’s rural heartland. The book chronicles a recent visit the artist made to see her extended family in Ohio—a place she knew as a child that sparked her interest in American iconography.
“I last visited my family in Ohio in 1999,” Cohen says. “Now, four generations of one family live in two houses right next door to each other on a tree-lined cul-de-sac. The house was very much alive—there was a coziness to the chaos.” Returning 16 years later, she found an uncanny sense of continuity: “The TVs were still on as though they’d never been turned off, and the kids running around felt like reincarnations of me, my brother, and our cousins. Conversations were picked up at the kitchen table as though all those years hadn’t passed. Although people were older, had unresolved differences, and weren’t in the best of health, all the negativity seemed to pause for the time we were there.”
Produced in partnership with and published by WePresent (the arts platform of WeTransfer) and distributed by IDEA Books, Holy Ohio is designed to resemble a bible in both its dimensions and graphic style. Keep scrolling for a first look inside, ahead of its December 12 release.
