Originally from Chester, Pennsylvania, Janet Cooling grew up in the suburbs of New Jersey. In 1969, she moved to Brooklyn to attend Pratt, where she obtained her B.F.A. in 1973. In 1975, she went to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, receiving an M.F.A. In the years following her graduation, Cooling worked at Artemisia, the women's cooperative gallery in Chicago, which helped expose her to feminist art spaces and lesbian politics. It was here that she received her first solo show at Canis Gallery in the Woman’s Building in Los Angeles in 1976. Cooling is a post-imagist serigraph artist, which is a form of silk screen printing from an original artwork. Most of her work pertained to sexuality and the female form.
