orn in 1955 in Somerville New Jersey, Willie Cole is a noted contemporary African American sculptor and conceptual and visual artist. Cole’s art is best known for assembling ordinary domestic and used objects such as irons, ironing boards, high-heeled shoes, hair dryers, bicycle parts, wooden matches, lawn jockeys, and other discarded appliances and hardware to make objects which reveal their nature as talismans and sometimes as a critique of capitalist and consumer culture. Through the repetitive use of single objects in multiples, his works acquire a transcending and renewed metaphorical meaning, transforming these everyday items into sculptures “melding the social, political, and cultural perspectives of urban African American experience. He frequently ritualizes his found “western” objects, creating potent global artistic hybrids. Many of his sculpture’s forms and motifs are directly derived from African art.”. 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. Cole has a B.F.A from The School of Visual Arts, New York and currently lives in Mine Hill, New Jersey. His work is in numerous private and public collections including the Museum of Modern Art (New York), The Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), and the Walker Art Center (Minnesota). He is represented by Alexander and Bonin Gallery in New York.
