Yolanda Cuomo (born June 7, 1957) is an American artist, educator, and art director known for her collaborations and intuitive design work with visual and performing artists, including Richard Avedon, the estate of Diane Arbus, Paul Simon, Laurie Anderson, Twyla Tharp, Laurie Simmons, Donna Ferrato, Larry Fink, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Sylvia Plachy, Gilles Peress, John Cohen, Paolo Pellegrin, Peter van Agtmael, Andrew Moore, and the estate of Al Taylor.
Through Israel, Cuomo had her first opportunities to work with Richard Avedon, Gilles Peress, Deborah Turbeville, Sylvia Plachy, Hiro, and Neil Selkirk, among others.
During VUE’s short life of six issues, Cuomo hired photographers, including Nan Goldin, Larry Fink, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Gilles Peress, Richard Corman, Amy Arbus, Michael Spano, Lynn Davis, Ellen Carey, Jeremiah Dine, William Wegman, and Sylvia Plachy, to photograph fashion spreads.
[3] For one assignment, Nan Goldin photographed a pregnant female body builder at a Russian bath in New York City’s East Village.
David Schneiderman, publisher and editor-in-chief of the Voice, said, "An executive from one major store, whose goods grace another model in the spread, found the ladies in lace 'shocking'...
Pre Pop Warhol[3] was published by Stutz’s imprint at Random House, Panache Press, winning the Art Directors Club’s 68th annual award for best book of the year.
In 1987 Cuomo was hired as the creative consultant for Parents (1989), a black comedy horror film set in the 1950s suburban America, directed by Bob Balaban and written by Christopher Hawthorne.
[9] Cuomo’s work with Paul Simon led to collaborations with Laurie Anderson on the albums Bright Red (1994) and The Ugly One with the Jewels (1995) as well as producing promotional materials for the Songs and Stories from Moby Dick performances.
Titled after Tharp’s 1976 dance work of the same name, Push Comes to Shove features many photographs by Richard Avedon, Martha Swope, James Klosty, and Lois Greenfield, among others, in addition to numerous posters designed by Israel and Cuomo.
[3] Harris and Cuomo had first worked together on Jean Pigozzi’s A Short Visit to Planet Earth (1991), a book of photographs that Mick Jagger wrote, “shows us an inside view of the world of flesh, food, celebrities, and dogs that most paparazzi can only dream about.
He has recorded moments of my life that I was barely aware were happening, usually with great humor.”[11] Harris and Cuomo collaboratively produced numerous monographs, including Sylvia Plachy’s Goings On About Town[12] and Self Portrait with Cows Going Home;[6] Nick Nichols’s Earth to Sky;[13] Donna Ferrato’s Love and Lust;[14] Dona Ann McAdams’s Caught in the Act; Dario Fo’s Artful Laughter; Luca Babini’s Francesco Clemente: A Portrait; Luigi Ghirri’s It’s Beautiful Here, Isn’t It .
Koudelka’s negatives were smuggled out of the country, eventually distributed by Magnum Photos under the pseudonym “unknown Czech photographer” for the next sixteen years.
The retrospective included more than two hundred photographs as well as libraries and study centers, which recreated Arbus’s darkroom, bookshelves, and documents tracing the artist’s life and trajectory.
In the fall of 2011, Cuomo’s design for Diane Arbus, a show featuring many of the same materials, traveled to four European venues sponsored by the Jeu de Paume in Paris.
[19] On the morning of September 11, 2001, eleven members of Magnum Photos immediately dispersed from their monthly meeting in New York, documenting the day, as the events unfolded, creating a haunting photographic archive of the attacks.
[20] Within weeks, while New Yorkers were still paralyzed by the incomprehensible violence of the loss, photographer Thomas Hoepker approached PowerHouse with the images, and publisher Daniel Powers asked Cuomo to help make a book to benefit victims and their families.
[21] Here Is New York (2001) was a crowd-sourced exhibition and book of photographs spontaneously conceived and organized by Alice Rose George, Gilles Peress, Michael Shulman, and Charles Traub, in response to the attacks of September 11.
Within two days of the attacks, messages and photographs taped to the window of 116 Prince Street inspired an exhibition, as Michael Shulman notes in the book’s essay, “as broad and inclusive as possible, open to ‘anybody and everybody’: not just photojournalists and other professional photographers, but bankers, rescue workers, artists and children—amateurs of every stripe.” In this spirit, Cuomo and Peress designed the book not “to showcase the ‘best’ or ‘strongest’ images, but to give the most coherent sense of the whole.”[22] The proceeds from the sale of Here Is New York were donated to the Children’s Aid Society to benefit the families of victims of the attacks.
[23] Between 2007 and 2009 Cuomo curated and designed Access to Life (2009), an exhibition and book featuring the work of several Magnum photographers: Jim Goldberg, Eli Reed, Steve McCurry, Larry Towell, Jonas Bendiksen, Paolo Pellegrin, Alex Majoli, and Gilles Peress.
[24] Access to Life was a historic collaboration between the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, and Magnum Photos, “to document the transformative effects of treatment with antiretroviral drugs against AIDS on more than thirty individuals and their families in nine countries around the world.”[25] This combination of art, documentary, and advocacy, resulted in a book published by Aperture and an exhibition that traveled to Rome, New York, Sydney, Tokyo, Oakland, Oslo, Madrid, Paris, and Washington, D.C., to spread awareness and garner support for the Global Fund.
[29] In 2012 Cuomo again collaborated with Norma Stevens to edit New York at Night: Photography After Dark,[3] an anthology showcasing New York City’s nightlife through photographs by James Van Der Zee, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Diane Arbus, Elliott Erwitt, Larry Fink, Robert Frank, Gilles Peress, Weegee, and Ryan McGinley, among others.
New York at Night features essays by Adam Gopnik, Vince Aletti, Patricia Marx, and Pete Hamill, and an introduction by Norma Stevens.
Santo Domingo’s library and archives featured more than one hundred thousand items and covered everything from drafts by Marcel Proust and Sigmund Freud to the Rolling Stones and Lenny Bruce.