Anxious Objects

An object maker, musician, poet, and performer, Willie Cole is an artist with remarkably diverse art-making skills and a formidable imagination. Best known for his assemblage, mixed media sculptural works, and prints, Cole liberates and aggrandizes everyday artifacts, including irons, ironing boards, hairdryers, high-heeled shoes, lawn jockeys, bicycle parts, and other discarded domestic appliances and hardware and transforms them into powerful and iconic art works. The time-textured objects that he works with are seen by most as banal and expendable, but in Cole's hands they are given new vitality and metaphorical meaning. Frequently, he takes his found American consumer objects and Africanizes or ritualizes them, creating potent global artistic hybrids. His works also track his distinctive, Newark, New Jersey-based heritage, movingly melding the social, political, and cultural perspectives of urban African American experience.