Los Angeles, CA — The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) presents Eileen Cowin: Between Panic and Paradise, the Los Angeles–based artist’s first major museum exhibition. Often blurring the distinction between nonfiction and fiction, Cowin’s provocative photography and video works have explored romance and confrontation, the personal and the political, and the monotony and mystery of daily life, for more than 50 years.
Between Panic and Paradise spotlights major themes across Cowin’s career, from early experimentation with material processes to the artist’s interest in text and cinematic conventions to new reflections on aging. The exhibition brings together more than 50 works from LACMA’s collection, the J. Paul Getty Museum, and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, with multiple exposures, Polaroids, inkjet prints, and video, spanning from 1967 to 2025. Along with loans from the artist, this presentation includes a significant selection acquired by LACMA in 2014.
LACMA’s relationship with Cowin extends to the very origins of the museum’s photography exhibition program. In 1985, her Family Docudrama series was included in New American Photography, curated by Kathleen Gauss shortly after the formation of the Photography Department. That exhibition was part of a seven-part series that recognized the work of Cowin and her peers, marking the beginning of LACMA’s sustained engagement with the experimental ethos of Southern California photobased art.
Between Panic and Paradise is curated by Rebecca Morse, curator of LACMA’s Wallis Annenberg Photography Department, and Britt Salvesen, curator and department head of the Wallis Annenberg Photography Department and the Prints and Drawings Department, with Hope Flores, curatorial assistant of the Wallis Annenberg Photography Department.
“Between Panic and Paradise affords us the opportunity to celebrate the career of an artist who not only paved the way for experimental narrative photography in Los Angeles, but who also helped inaugurate the photography program at LACMA more than 40 years ago,” said Morse and Salvesen. “In some ways, it has been a long time coming, yet it is occurring at what feels like the ideal moment in our culture and world.”
“Eileen Cowin has expanded the possibilities of photography to engage lived experience with clarity, complexity, and imagination,” said Michael Govan, LACMA CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director. “LACMA is thrilled to present this major survey and to showcase the breadth of her work, including our substantial holdings.”
Exhibition Highlights Between Panic and Paradise is organized by bodies of work from different periods to reveal the artist’s recurring thematic concerns. The earliest works in the exhibition, spanning 1967–71, are transparency overlays in which the artist combines personal images of friends and domestic interiors with mass-media images as in Chicago (1971). In these works, Cowin plays with ideas of withholding information and creating a public persona as well as with a variety of material processes.
In the late 1970s, Cowin began building narratives between pairs of Polaroid images and accompanying text as seen in Dive (1977), where two images and their written definitions differentiate “dive” as a verb from “dive” as a noun. This important body of work led to her series One Night Stand, and then to her highly lauded series from the early 1980s, Family Docudrama. Appropriating the look of theater set designs and television soap operas, a couple engaged in domestic activities dominates the series visually. However, Cowin’s illustration of conditions, situations, and attendant emotions comes to the fore.
In the mid-1990s, Cowin began to make multi-part compositions, such as the collaborative piece Don’t Ever Lie to Me (1994), featuring text by novelist Louise Erdrich. At the same time, Cowin made her first video work, dealing with memory and interpretation, examining how one scenario has as many readings as there are readers. In the single-channel video I Give You My Word (2002), Cowin and her husband both tell the story of their first meeting where some details diverge and others overlap.