Willie Cole: Deep Impressions
Willie Cole: Deep Impressions
Willie Cole: Deep Impressions
January 16 - March 10, 2012This exhibition and its accompanying booklet are the first to be dedicated to surveying the works on paper of the New Jersey born, raised, and based artist Willie Cole. Spanning more than thirty years, from an intense pastel self-portrait, ca. 1977, to recent foreboding, graphic novel–like images, and highlighting the rich range of his prints, from a poster he designed in 1984 to a recent large-scale, technically innovative lattice-work piece, the show demonstrates that this artist—best known for his sculpture—has found many ways with works on paper to make deep cultural and personal impressions.
Born in 1955, Cole reached his artistic maturity in the mid-1980s with his labor-intensive assemblages of discarded American consumer products: hair dryers, high-heeled shoes, lawn jockeys, ironing boards, and, above all, steam irons, and their scorched or stenciled impressions. In his deft hands these banal salvaged objects were transformed into objects of beauty, balance, and spirituality
Cole has actively worked on paper since he started making art, at first simply responding to the medium’s ready accessibility and low cost. Beginning at ten years old, he took drawing classes. Drawing was a major part of his training in high school, where he recalls making his first prints, silk screened t-shirts, and at Boston University’s School of Fine Arts and the School of Visual Arts and the Art Students League in New York City. Works on paper permit Cole to rapidly and spontaneously explore alternative compositions, colors, and points of view. His drawings have maintained a more traditional artistic approach; his works in sculpture and other media have been much more unconventional. Printmaking has offered him the chance to have others help him realize his ideas, create more communally, and reach out and have his work seen and owned by a wider public. Cole recently wrote: “I still feel new in printmaking. . . . More to explore. More to learn. It feels like a mixed-media approach. Once an image is printed, it can be painted on, attached to, folded, etc. . . . and I haven’t done any of that yet.”
Patterson Sims
Guest Curator
Willie Cole: Deep Impressions Exhibition Catalog
About the Artist
Willie Cole has lived and worked almost his entire life within thirty miles of Newark, New Jersey. The harsh realities of inner-city life for African Americans—so grimly embodied in the post–World War II urban blight and political corruption of Newark, the state’s largest city—and their aspirations are the underpinning of his art. His art powerfully contrasts the dichotomies of life in New Jersey as well as those of the wider landscape of America: affluent suburbs and vast upscale malls exist alongside urban, industrial, and natural wastelands and miles of marginal retail strips; abundant personal wealth is enjoyed in a land suffering from economic, racial, and political discord and chronic poverty. Likewise, Cole posits his art between three dichotomies: the distinctive male and female personalities of his father and mother, the “field” and “house” slaves as defined by Malcolm X, and abstract aesthetics and political and cultural critique.
Cole’s widely recurring symbolic and artistic object that was initially brought to the attention of the art world in the mid-1980s has been the steam iron. While Cole’s unique approach of imprinting the steam iron’s marks on a variety of media result in a wide-ranging decorative potential of his scorchings, these scorches are also to be viewed as a reference to Cole’s African American heritage. Its multiple manifestations in scorched and stenciled impressions on canvas and paper are positioned to signify archetypal motifs so that, upright, with the iron point at bottom, they become a human or spirit face; upright, with the point at the top, a house; sideways, a boat; and arrayed at angles, warriors’ shields and armor. Grouped and conjoined, the steam iron’s imprints evoke a range of subjects from spirits of domestic and existential dramas to battling forces and the blossoms of flowers.
Willie Cole attended the Boston University School of Fine Arts, received his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the School of Visual Arts in New York in 1976. Willie Cole is the recipient of many awards, including the 2006 Winner of the David C. Driskell Prize, the first national award to honor and celebrate contributions to the field of African American art and art history, established by the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia. Willie Cole’s work is found in numerous private and public collections and museums around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, New York; the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.; the Baltimore Museum of Art in Baltimore, Maryland; the Philadelphia Museum of Art in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; the Montclair Art Museum, the Newark Museum of Art, and the New Jersey State Museum in Trenton in New Jersey; among others.
Willie Cole has lived and worked almost his entire life within thirty miles of Newark, New Jersey. The harsh realities of inner-city life for African Americans—so grimly embodied in the post–World War II urban blight and political corruption of Newark, the state’s largest city—and their aspirations are the underpinning of his art. His art powerfully contrasts the dichotomies of life in New Jersey as well as those of the wider landscape of America: affluent suburbs and vast upscale malls exist alongside urban, industrial, and natural wastelands and miles of marginal retail strips; abundant personal wealth is enjoyed in a land suffering from economic, racial, and political discord and chronic poverty. Likewise, Cole posits his art between three dichotomies: the distinctive male and female personalities of his father and mother, the “field” and “house” slaves as defined by Malcolm X, and abstract aesthetics and political and cultural critique.
Cole’s widely recurring symbolic and artistic object that was initially brought to the attention of the art world in the mid-1980s has been the steam iron. While Cole’s unique approach of imprinting the steam iron’s marks on a variety of media result in a wide-ranging decorative potential of his scorchings, these scorches are also to be viewed as a reference to Cole’s African American heritage. Its multiple manifestations in scorched and stenciled impressions on canvas and paper are positioned to signify archetypal motifs so that, upright, with the iron point at bottom, they become a human or spirit face; upright, with the point at the top, a house; sideways, a boat; and arrayed at angles, warriors’ shields and armor. Grouped and conjoined, the steam iron’s imprints evoke a range of subjects from spirits of domestic and existential dramas to battling forces and the blossoms of flowers.
Willie Cole attended the Boston University School of Fine Arts, received his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the School of Visual Arts in New York in 1976. Willie Cole is the recipient of many awards, including the 2006 Winner of the David C. Driskell Prize, the first national award to honor and celebrate contributions to the field of African American art and art history, established by the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia. Willie Cole’s work is found in numerous private and public collections and museums around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, New York; the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.; the Baltimore Museum of Art in Baltimore, Maryland; the Philadelphia Museum of Art in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; the Montclair Art Museum, the Newark Museum of Art, and the New Jersey State Museum in Trenton in New Jersey; among others.