Chris McLaughlin "Mississippi Barking" & Barbara Cohen "Dog Time"

Chris McLaughlin "Mississippi Barking" & Barbara Cohen "Dog Time" - A special human & Dog Event!

About this Event

East End Books Ptown presents: Chris McLaughlin "Mississippi Barking" & Barbara Cohen "Dog Time" - A special human & Dog Event (Doggie Treats for every dog...). 8/29 at 6pm. East End Books Ptown.

20th Anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.

Mississippi Barking: Hurricane Katrina and a Life That Went to the Dogs

Winner of a 2023 Best Book Award in the category of Animals/Pets: Narrative Nonfiction from American Book Fest

An emotional recounting of animal rescue during the aftermath of one of the nation's worst storms

In the months that followed Hurricane Katrina, thousands of pets were fending for themselves in the ruins of devastated neighborhoods. They roamed the streets in feral packs or struck out alone. Their plight triggered a grassroots rescue effort unlike any this country had ever seen, and while relief organizations such as the Red Cross were tending to the human survivors, a much smaller and meagerly funded effort was underway to save the four-legged victims. With no prior experience in disaster response and no real grasp of the hell that awaited them, scores of animal lovers, including McLaughlin, made their way to the Gulf Coast to help in any way they could. Including photos from four-time Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Carol Guzy, this book spans the course of two years as McLaughlin and others ventured into the wreckage of the Gulf Coast to rescue the animals left behind.

Mississippi Barking: Hurricane Katrina and A Life That Went to the Dogs is really a story about people. People who had nothing left and who were committed to saving the animals impacted by the hurricane. . . McLaughlin's narration adds a personal touch that makes the reader feel the heartaches and the triumphs of this effort. . . This book is recommended for both public and academic Mississippi historical and nonfiction collections. Mississippi Barking would especially succeed in libraries in Mississippi and Louisiana that collect firsthand accounts of Hurricane Katrina.--Judith Hilkert "Mississippi Libraries"

Chris McLaughlin is founder and executive director of the Animal Rescue Front and is a bookseller at East End Books Ptown. A graduate of the University of Massachusetts Boston with a BA in earth sciences, she lives in Massachusetts with two cats. This is her first book.

Barbara Cohen is an abstract painter, sculptor, photographer, and author. "Dog Time" features oil-manipulated painted polaroids using Fujifilm. Barbara E. Cohen received her BFA from Tufts University and the School of Museum of Fine Arts, Boston with earlier studies in art history at Oxford University.

Cohen is a multi-media artist whose artistic work spans five decades. Her paintings and sculptures have been exhibited in numerous galleries and museums across the country.

Cohen has been the recipient of numerous grants including the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, Artists Foundation Mass Fellowship Program Grant, Polaroid Artist Support Program Grant, Blanche E. Colman Award and Cambridge and Massachusetts Arts Council Grants.

Residencies include the Emily Harvey Foundation, Venice, Italy (2011, 2013),The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Sweetbriar, Virginia (Date), Skopelos Foundation for the Arts, Skopelos Island, Greece (2023) and Cycladic Arts Residency, Paros Island, Greece (2024).

Barbara Cohen exhibits her work in galleries and museums across the United States. She has published Dogs and Their Women (1989), Cats and Their Women (1992), Horses and Their Women (1993), Woman's Best Friend (1996), and Dog in the Dunes (1998). Cohen lives and works in Provincetown and Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Love of Dogs

"I grew up without dogs. My first dog love was Eros, a mixed black labrador found in a cardboard box on the streets of Ferndale, California in 1975. Later, I decided to tape-record outrageous stories of women with dogs in Los Angeles, which eventually became "Dogs and Their Women," "Cats and Their Women," "Horses and Their Women," and "Woman's Best Friend" followed.

ARTIST STATEMENT

It is always about the paint and the strokes: Thick muted colors of oil on pure linen, fast florescent gouache washes on Fabriano paper, quick small detailed oil strokes on instant Polaroid film. The touch and sensation of the stroke and paint come together with the emotionally-based content which takes me inside the edges of my work. I once painted portraits of the elderly women chatting away in Yiddish, relics of a dying culture, who sat on the beaches of Venice, California. Seeing and hearing them there every day evoked the tortured figures of people, my people, minutes before their extermination in the Nazi camps. My work continued with the imaged memories of the row after row of boxes rising up to the ceiling in my grandfather’s century-old wholesale dry goods store.

Many years later, in a new period of my work, these tall boxy images returned in paintings which focused on dwellings, dumpsters and displacements camps. The repetitive use of circles and squares dominates much of my painting and sculpture in what may be an unconscious effort to create a calming balance.

For several years, white, soft cork imported from Asian wetlands provided me with the material for a relentless drive to cut and build sculptures. Then, it was ping pong balls which I covered with graphite drawings and assembled on a moveable conveyor belt which helped buffer my grief after a death and to move forward. While I was at a residency in Venice, Italy, a boat sling hanging gracefully above the waters of the Grand Canal became the inspiration for a series of flow images devoted to examining continuous, elegant motion.

This is what I do. I take an image and I repeat it with every medium that I love until I exhaust it. Among my subjects: potholder loops, a striped juice glass, New York City dumpsters, life jackets and displacements camps, and old shoes left behind. It is now 2020 and the world is in the grips of a brutal pandemic. Living in New York City and homebound, I began exploring the painting of still lifes. This has evolved into my “farmer’s market” series featuring fruits and vegetables, painted in gouache on recycled brown paper bags.

My current work is a continuation of abstract works on paper depicting the landscapes of the structures and walls from the Greece Islands. The Greek culture, the people, their joy and their colorful ways of daily living have been a deep source of influence to my painting.

Barbara E. Cohen

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