Rajie Cook

Rajie Cook, (born in Newark, NJ 1930) an internationally known graphic designer, photographer and artist, lives in Washington Crossing, PA.

Cook is a graduate of the Pratt Institute and in 1997 was selected as Alumni of the year, and has also served on the Pratt Advisory Board. He has been a member of the American Institute of Graphic Arts.

He has been the President of Cook and Shanosky Associates, Inc., a graphic design firm he founded in 1967 in New York City. The firm produced all forms of corporate communications; including: Corporate Identity, Advertising, Signage, Annual Reports and Brochures. His graphic design and photography have been used by IBM, Container Corporation of America, Montgomery Ward, Squibb Corporation, Black & Decker, Volvo, Subaru, AT&T, New York Times, Bell Atlantic, BASF, Lenox, and a number of other major national and international corporations.

He received the Presidential Award for Design Excellence from President Reagan and Elizabeth Dole on January 30,1984 in the Indian Treaty Room of the Old Executive Office Building in Washington, DC. Juries under the auspices of the National Endowments chose the thirteen winners of the Federal Design Achievement Awards for the Arts.

In 2003, "Symbols Signs" a project designed by his firm for the US Department of Transportation was accepted by the Acquisitions Committee to the collections of Cooper Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution,

Inspired in part by the work of Joseph Cornell, Cook has turned to sculptural assemblage.

Artist Statement:
In 1999, after 46 years as a graphic designer, Cook found time to explore this new medium, sculptural "assemblage". The inspiration and opportunity to explore this mode of artistic expression comes at a time when his commercial career had sufficiently matured so that he could apply his skills, experiences, and a lifetime of artistic perspective to create "statements" with these assemblages.

Most of his "raw" materials come from private collections, his own photography, flea markets, and antique shops, where he spends hours searching for items that inspire use in his boxes. His process, using these "found" materials, feels to him much like theater. “As in the legitimate stage, He work within a three-dimensional form to portray the comedy or tragedy of life. He create these miniature, silent, "theaters" to express his feelings about a range of subjects. The three-dimensional objects he constructs, using the found and fabricated objects (“my "Thespians"), are a series of "performances" that share his deepest feelings with his audience.

Many of the "Boxes" that he has created are an expression of the artist’s deeply felt concern for human rights and for the tragic conditions in the Middle East.