Allison B. Cooke

Throughout her thirty-year teaching career at the college level, Allison taught myriad drawing and painting studio courses at the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design and was a tenured Senior Lecturer in the Department of Art and Design housed in the Peck School of the Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

For twelve consecutive summers, Allison served as the Director and Adjunct Professor for a Study Abroad program, offered through the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, at the Santa Reparata International School of Art in Florence, Italy. She developed and taught an intensive four-week summer course in Renaissance Painting techniques. This course explored the use of dry pigments, homemade egg tempera paint, and myriad gold leaf techniques found in both traditional and contemporary studio practice.

She is now a full-time artist and works out of two studios. Allison paints in a well-seasoned attic in their old Victorian home, but most days in a spacious studio within a commercial building in the Lincoln Warehouse next to the Kinnickinnic River in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. At the present, Allison is represented by seven galleries across the United States.

Allison has an extensive national exhibition and sales record spanning over three decades. Her work is also found in public and private art collections in Germany, Japan, India, Ireland, and Italy. In 2013, Allison was invited to join an international group of artists in an ongoing collaborative project called The Drawing Box, where she exhibited mixed-media drawings in Ireland, Italy, Malaysia, and the Philippines. To this day, she joins fellow Drawing Box artists to exhibit drawings in both established and alternative venues around the world. In the spring of 2017, Allison’s paintings were published with one hundred fellow contemporary artists in a comprehensive new book by Rebecca Crowell and Jerry McLaughlin called Cold Wax Medium: Techniques, Concepts & Conversations.