Café Pan-Soviético Americano

Café Pan-Soviético Americano is a continuation of Liz Cohen’s previous bodies of work that use portraiture and humor to flip scripts and reverse roles around labor, gender, and Latinidad. The exhibition is anchored by a sculptural automobile, GAZ COFFEE Build #2, a 1969 GAZ-69A, that Cohen has customized (and will continue to transform like her laborious Trabantimino) into a functional coffee station as a gathering place with activations honoring the heritage of workers throughout the run of the show. Also on view are her lustrous hand-sculpted ceramicware visually marrying Soviet constructivist aesthetics, Colombian artifacts, and American nostalgia with fertility symbols on recognizable Thermos shapes, finished in real, glistening gold glaze.