Lee Cooper has returned to the visual arts after a brief hiatus of 50 years. He joined the UCLA faculty in 1969 in a highly quantitative area that anticipated the big-data era of today. By 1974, he was also a member of Workshop I.E., a cooperative artists studio on Main Street in Santa Monica, doing limited-edition prints using woodcuts, linoleum blocks, and photo-serigraphy. Around that time, he co-owned, with his father, the Cooper Gallery on Robertson in the designer/decorator area. Using art to organize the UCLA community around creative activities, he directed plays, art shows, and edited satirical magazines -- leading to a stint, post tenure, as Deputy Director and then three years as Director of the UCLA Management in the Arts Program, jointly sponsored by the College of Fine Arts and what is now called the Anderson School. Dean Harold Williams, later the head of the SEC and still later head of the Getty Trust, tutored him in dealing with the Boards of major arts organizations. He was the Co-Founder and first President of the Association of Arts Administration Educators. Cooper co-authored The Arts in the Economic Life of the City, published by the American Council for the Arts, and honored by the National Endowment for the Arts. Harvey Perloff, Dean of Architecture and Urban Planning, led the book team.

By 1979, Cooper shifted full focus to his primary academic agenda, developing decision-relevant meaning from information-rich environments. Market-Share Analysis, the 1988 book he co-wrote with his primary collaborator details the methods. In the 1990s, with grants from Intel, he started working on strategic planning for radically new products and designing the information systems for managing in the face of disruptive change. In 2000, he founded Strategic Data Corp. In an era when it took 36 hours to analyze 24 hours of one-person’s Internet logs, he designed a recommendation engine that scaled to nine-billion optimized decisions a day. That was enterprise scale back then. SDC sold to News Corp. in 2007, five years after his return to full-time efforts at UCLA. During that period, Cooper designed and headed the Venture Development Project in the Price Center for Entrepreneurial Studies. Technology teams from UCLA labs were matched with MBA teams to plan and launch new ventures. His 2004 book Midlife Startup tells the story. By 2009, he had developed a strategic alliance between UCLA and Conservation International, soon began serving seven years on the Board of the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, co-founded the Conservation Action Research Network, worked in the Healthy Campus Initiative to develop action-research partnerships that led to his creating the UCLA Epicenter for Action Research. His 2018 book, Systems Entrepreneurship, details the developments until that time. Cooper retired from that role in the Spring of 2023.

Photography has been a lifelong interest and activity. With an archive of images spanning decades, Cooper returned to printmaking in the Summer of 2022 to fill the empty walls of his apartment in Cádiz, Spain. Cádiz itself provides many new opportunities to find images that delight him. Master printer, Eric Joseph, guided Cooper’s return to printmaking with the new, digital technologies. So, his art is what he wants to live with. The Cooper Gallery Collection contain prints that hang in his homes in Cádiz or Santa Monica -- in some cases both. Aside from printmaking, Cooper has recently been elected to the Board of the Los Angeles Ballet and, of course, selected as a Lazarus Member of TAG – The Artists Gallery: https://www.taggallery.net/artists#/lee-cooper/.

Artist Statement In late 2021 we bought an apartment that overlooks the Atlantic in Cádiz, Spain. After having 50 years of wallpaper scrapped off and freshly painting all walls, I had a giant, empty gallery. One room was set aside for family photos, while the rest begged the question “What art do I want to see here every day?” I had decided to return to printmaking and wanted our apartment to be my personal gallery. The Cooper Gallery Collection displays the results that hang in my homes in Spain and Santa Monica.  My blogs, “Where I See Beauty in the World,” “Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man,” and “Real Time Goes Too Fast,” elaborate my developing esthetic. For current photography, the interplay of shape, color, and light draw me to a point of view from which I hope to capture a fleeting moment in time and the fine detail that fuels stories of place. In taking new photos now, I more actively look for beauty at fast changing times: dawn, magic hour/sunset, or moon rise. These beautiful moments merit more contemplation than the rapidly changing light allows. Actively looking for beauty is a reward in itself. Then comes the process of transforming the digital image in an archival print. I’ve enjoyed learning the new technologies that let me get in the print what I see on the screen. I print on Canson Infinity Arches 88. I found that this paper and the new pigment inks, create luminous images under museum lights, better viewed without glass. When I see on the screen something I wish I could have painted, I hit “Print.” These are archival prints. Editions are limited, signed and dated in pencil, and embossed with the LGCchop, which indicates I am the printer. They are archivally mounted and framed, ready for hanging.