Location: Sebastopol, CA
Medium: Sculpture, Craft
Website: museumsc.org
Michael Cooper was born in 1943 in Richmond, California, and grew up in the Lodi and Acampo area of the Central Valley. He studied commercial art and completed a master’s degree in sculpture at San Jose State College, then earned his MFA in sculpture from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1969.
For 34 years, until retiring in 2004, Cooper taught drawing, three-dimensional design, furniture design, and sculpture at Foothill College and De Anza College in Cupertino, as well as at California College of the Arts, becoming an influential figure for generations of Bay Area sculptors and craftspeople. He has lived and worked for decades in Sebastopol, in Sonoma County. His work has been recognized with a Fellowship in Sculpture from the American Academy in Rome (1979–80), a fellowship from the Crafts Council of Australia (1979), a Craftsman’s Fellowship Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (1978), and election as a Fellow of the American Craft Council in 2016.
Over a five-decade career, Cooper’s sculpture has been the subject of major museum retrospectives, including the traveling survey Michael Cooper: A Sculptural Odyssey, 1968–2011, which originated at the Bellevue Arts Museum and was presented at the Museum of Craft and Design in San Francisco and the Fuller Craft Museum in Massachusetts, and Art of Risk: The Innovative Sculpture of Michael Cooper at the Museum of Sonoma County (2022–2023). His life and work are documented in the monograph Workmanship of Risk: Sculpture by Michael Cooper.
Cooper works at the intersection of fine art sculpture, craft, engineering, and custom car and hot-rod design, building intricately engineered pieces that combine bent-laminated and steam-bent wood with machined metal, found objects, and, frequently, working mechanical or motorized components. His sculptures often take the form of impossible vehicles — hot rods, tricycles, dragsters, and even a nearly life-size helicopter — built with the same painstaking hand craftsmanship as fine cabinetry, prizing skilled problem-solving over industrial repetition (a quality he has described in terms of the “workmanship of risk”).
Recurring themes in his work include mobility, the American car culture of his Central Valley youth, and a playful tension between mechanical function and sculptural abstraction. Later pieces, such as the kinetic sculpture Chain Reaction and the Gun in Curved Perspective series, extend this vocabulary toward more overtly social and kinetic concerns, while never losing the wit and material virtuosity that define his practice.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
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