Emma cc Cook (b. 1989, Minneapolis, MN) is a Los Angeles–based artist whose paintings and sculptures examine the American landscape as a site of memory, labor, aspiration, and ecological transformation. Rooted in her upbringing on a Midwestern family farm, Cook’s work considers how agricultural systems, industrial expansion, and inherited narratives have reshaped both the physical environment and its representation. Rural landscapes, domestic interiors, tools, crops, and vernacular symbols recur throughout her practice, forming an idiosyncratic vocabulary in which personal recollection intersects with broader histories of American settlement, cultivation, and extraction.
Cook constructs her paintings through dense processes of accumulation and revision. Layers of oil and acrylic are applied, removed, and rearticulated until their surfaces acquire a compact, sedimented quality. Expansive fields and cinematic panoramas are frequently interrupted by gridded compartments, cropped views, isolated objects, and fragmentary vignettes that recall comic strips, storyboards, flags, and architectural plans. These systems of organization remain deliberately unstable: narratives form and dissolve, symbols suggest inherited meanings without fully explaining themselves, and beauty is held in tension with an underlying sense of ecological or social unease.
Across exhibitions including Flags at Moskowitz Bayse, Los Angeles (2022); Dibbler Stick at Adams and Ollman, Portland (2023); Manners, Hayseed at 12.26, Dallas (2024); Bucolic Cob at Public Gallery, London (2025); and Bucolic Cob: Bellevue at House of Seiko, Los Angeles (2026), Cook has developed an interconnected body of work addressing the transformation of rural and urban space. Her paintings move between the apparent serenity of cultivated land and the systems of capital, technology, and labor that structure it. In her recent studies of the Los Angeles basin, the landscape becomes a layered record of its passage from irrigated agricultural experiment to expansive urban grid—a place where inherited terrain and planned environment remain in uneasy alignment.
Cook’s practice extends beyond the painted surface through artist-designed frames, upholstery, carved wood, steel, and sculptures that evoke farm implements, furniture, and domestic objects. These forms blur distinctions between painting, craft, architecture, and functional design while reflecting her interest in the cultural value assigned to labor and making. Moving between the familiar and the uncanny, the utilitarian and the ceremonial, Cook transforms the material language of American domestic and agricultural life into psychologically charged environments shaped by cycles of ruin, adaptation, and renewal.
Cook received a BFA in painting from the University of Minnesota and studied classical realism at the Angel Academy in Florence, Italy. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include House of Seiko, Los Angeles (2026); 12.26, Los Angeles (2025); Public Gallery, London (2025 and 2022); Outer Space, Concord, New Hampshire (2024); Anonymous Gallery, New York (2024); 12.26, Dallas (2024); Adams and Ollman, Portland (2023); Moskowitz Bayse, Los Angeles (2022); Et al., San Francisco (2022); and Half Gallery, New York (2021). Her work has also been included in group exhibitions at Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York; COMA, Sydney; Sixi Museum, Nanjing; Almine Rech, Brussels; and Richard Heller Gallery, Los Angeles.