Liz Cohen works deeply and slowly. She creates extensive bodies of work whose layers of historical and cultural investigation unfold over many years to reflect generative inquiries into labor, gender roles, and migration networks. Perhaps best known for her project Bodywork—in which she custom-built a hybrid sedan-lowrider and adopted new identities to probe notions of in-betweenness—Cohen has been researching the history of coffee production and its effects on the Global South, particularly during the Cold War in Colombia, where her family is from. The ongoing Café Pan-Soviético Americano presents an interactive coffee station operating out of a Soviet utility truck that traces the flow of labor and capital from extractive industries. “I often have a central object that functions like the sun, and then there are all these satellites around it that are just spinning off of it,” Cohen says. “It’s this anchoring force where I get to spiral out into all these tangential stories, but they all come back and relate to this central thing.”

In Miami, she extended the Café Pan-Soviético Americano universe, working on a large textile piece she had started years ago but hadn’t had time to finish. Sewn with automotive-upholstery threads, the applique work depicts the Soviet military jeep at the project’s heart—a GAZ-69A—coffee-plant branches, and a machete. It is in essence a picnic blanket meant to go inside the car—thus imagining the jeep’s use within the realms of leisure and pleasure. “The works are part of this elaborate way of creating parameters for experience,” Cohen says. “I produce objects and images to create an atmosphere for something to happen.”

This was her first residency in more than two decades, and it gave her space to clear her mind, with mornings spent swimming in the ocean before diving into sewing. “It’s great to shake up your daily routine,” Cohen says. “It made me realize ways to lean into aspects of my process, given the structure of my life—how can I stitch for 10 minutes, if that’s all I have. Leaving for a month was really healthy for me, in terms of focusing and having clarity.”