Lisa Cook was born in Lake Charles, Louisiana, and was raised in New Orleans. The young painter walked the sidewalks of the infamous French Quarter in the 1970’s, fascinated by the overt hustle of feminine flesh as commerce and as commodity. Typically, strip shows flung their doors wide open to allow a free eyeful to attract male customers off the muggy French Quarter sidewalks into the air-conditioned dens of iniquity.

Cook was fascinated by the power these women on stages and pedestals had over their captive audiences. Women in this sort of work found themselves no longer lonely, their work placed them in a tight-knit sorority not unlike that of circus performers. Her sense of not belonging in the world was replaced by a sense of belonging and a seemingly endless source of power and autonomy, relating to but not wholly encompassed by her ability to make money, lots of it, as long as her physical beauty lasts. Mardi Gras would bring all this shimmying flesh and sexuality out into the mainstream, with otherwise “morally respectable” participants along the parade route engaging in or timidly playing at the very acts of debauchery they are repulsed by the rest of the year.

Cook’s recent body of work is a series of the artist’s interpretations of women in mythology, including those represented in Pre-Christian ideologies that worshipped a life-giving Mother Goddess. On the flip side of the coin are those that have been maligned through the centuries and subsequently morphed into evil temptresses and destroyers.