San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Designed exhibitions for top museums
After 62 years as a museum exhibition designer, Ted Cohen earned the supreme professional compliment in his field — a museum exhibition about a museum exhibition designer.
To be called “The Object in its Place, As Designed by Ted Cohen,” it was scheduled to open after Labor Day at the Museum of Craft and Design in San Francisco’s Dogpatch neighborhood, and only one person was qualified to design it — Ted Cohen.
“Nobody ever told Ted where to put anything, and he didn’t have any assistants,” said Carol Covington, an exhibition curator who collaborated with Cohen for 25 years.
“Ted would come in with his handdrawn maps and manage the installation crew to his specifications. Then he would tweak it to perfection through every nuance including the lighting.”
Cohen was 10 months into designing his eponymous show when he suffered a fall at his apartment in Oakland, where he was born and raised. He was rushed to the hospital where tests revealed he’d also had a heart attack and was suffering from an undiagnosed case of leukemia, Covington said. Cohen refused all treatments and died June 29, after a week in hospice care. He was 93.
His death marked the end for a career that touched more than 30 museums nationwide. Cohen, who taught himself the trade by installing window displays at a furniture showroom in Oakland, rose to become the exhibition designer at the Oakland Museum of California, a position he held either as a staffer or as an independent contractor, for more than 50 years.
“People familiar with his exhibitions could recognize his style as soon as they walked through a gallery he designed,” said Signe Mayfield, an independent curator and author of “The Object in Its Place: Ted Cohen and the Art of Exhibition Design,” published in 2020. “He was able to create relationships between pieces so that they suggest a story for the viewer to think about.”
Cohen traveled the world collecting for his own apartment museum of folk art and curated art collections for hospitals and residential clients, and installed shows at community nonprofits such as the Palo Alto Art Center and commercial galleries including Paule Anglim and Virginia Breier, in San Francisco.
“You could give Ted an empty warehouse space and pictures of 30 art objects and he could visualize how those objects could be arranged in the most remarkable way to transform that space,” Mayfield said.
Theodore H. Cohen was born April 27, 1928, at Fabiola Hospital in Oakland. Later in his life, he’d tell people that Fabiola meant Fabulous and he enjoyed answering to the nickname “Mr. Fabulous,” Covington said.
Cohen attended Castlemont High School, which was built to look like a castle with turrets on the roof and a surrounding dirt moat. After graduating in 1945, he attempted to join the U.S. Navy but was rejected because of colorblindness. The U.S. Army took him anyway, and he was posted in Japan at the end of World War II in a signpainting detail.
Upon his release from the Army in 1948, he enrolled at California College of Arts and Crafts to study fine art painting
on the GI Bill. His first job in the arts was doing window displays at a record store. Then he advanced to Jackson Furniture Co.
In 1959, Cohen took a civil service exam to be a preparator — someone who sets up and tears down installations — at the Oakland Art Gallery (later merged into the Oakland Museum of California). He worked his way up to exhibition designer, in a fulltime career that lasted until 1986 and freelance until 2013.
“Ted Cohen was an absolutely unique treasure in the museum world,” said Lori Fogarty, director of the Oakland Museum of California. “Before exhibition design was even considered a profession or a specialty, he was trailblazing in understanding how to showcase artwork at its best and create magical and memorable experiences.”
One of his steadiest clients was the Museum of Craft and Design, which opened on Sutter Street in San Francisco in 2004 and moved to Dogpatch in 2013. Cohen consulted cofounder JoAnn Edwards on its opening and designed 66 out of 68 exhibitions before he retired in 2019.
“He only missed the other two because he was traveling,” Edwards said.
Cohen’s trips to exotic locales were notable considering that he never learned to drive a car. “He traveled the world, walking everywhere,” said Covington. “When he was in his mid80s, he hiked 3 miles down a dirt road in Ethiopia to see a tribal dance. He just kept going and going and going until his legs finally collapsed.”
Cohen retired three times but was always enticed out if it by a project. When he was hospitalized in June, Covington went to his apartment and collected his map and color swatches for his retrospective at the Museum of Craft and Design. She brought them to his bedside at the hospital, and he designed from there.
“He was really upset because he had not finished every last detail,” Covington said. “I assured him that I knew exactly what he wanted and that the show would go on and it would be ‘fabulous,’ using his favorite word.”
The exhibition has been postponed until February 2022, when it will open as a memorial tribute. Cohen’s personal collection has been donated to the Mingei International Museum in San Diego. Two hundred objects from 20 countries will be introduced in “Global Spirit: Folk Art from the Ted Cohen Collection” opening Sept. 3, 2021.
Donations may be made to the Ted Cohen Memorial Exhibition Fund, Museum of Craft and Design, 2569 Third St., San Francisco, CA 94107.