Well, you know I didn’t choose to make art. I was actually born an artist. –Willie Cole

Willie Cole is a contemporary American sculptor, printmaker, conceptual artist, and perceptual engineer.

Born in Somerville, New Jersey, in 1955, and raised in Newark, Cole first began taking art classes as a child, eventually attending Newark Arts High School where he studied fashion design before going on to complete a BFA in Media Arts in 1976 from the School of Visual Arts. There, he studied painting with Chuck Close and sculpture with Jonathan Borofsky. Cole continued his artistic studies for three years afterwards, taking classes in drawing, painting, and anatomy at the Art Students League of New York from 1976-1979.

He is best known for his use of everyday, used, and often discarded objects, such as steam irons and ironing boards, high-heel shoes, guitars, gas hoses, and plastic water bottles­. Through perceptual manipulations, Cole transforms these ordinary objects and their meanings in extraordinary ways­, forging connections between global histories of violence and the intimate objects and gestures of everyday life.

Cole’s work has exhibited widely throughout the US and internationally. Major solo exhibitions include, New Concepts in Printmaking 2: Willie Cole, the Museum of Modern Art (1998); New Work: Willie Cole at the Crossroads, Miami Art Museum (2000), Complex Conversations: Willie Cole Sculptures and Wall Works, Albertine Monroe-Brown Gallery, Western Michigan University (2013); Willie Cole: On-Site, David C. Driskell Center, the University of Maryland (2016); Willie Cole: Making Everything Out of Anything: Prints, Drawings, and Sculptures, Snite Museum of Art, University of Notre Dame (2017); and Willie Cole: Beauties, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University (2019).

Cole’s work has also been included in multiple group exhibitions, including Reconfiguring an African Icon: Odes to the Mask by Modern and Contemporary Artists from Three Continents, the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2011); Represent: 200 Years of African American Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art (2015); and Disguise: Masks and Global African Art, the Brooklyn Museum (2016), among others. Most recently, Cole’s latest work­­, Spirit Catcher (2022) and Lumen-less Lantern (2022)­–two large-scale sculptures made from used water bottles that examine Newark’s water crisis alongside global environmental degradation and pollution—were included in the exhibit, Perceptual Engineering, at Express Newark (2023).

Cole is the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including the prestigious David C. Driskell Prize in African American Art (2006), the Saint-Gaudens Fellowship (2002), the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award (1996), among others, and has held residencies at Express Newark (2022-23), the Minneapolis Museum of Art (2010), the John Michael Kohler Arts Center’s Arts/Industry Program (2000), the Studio Museum in Harlem (1998), and elsewhere. His work is held in museum collections throughout the United States, and in Canada, France, and England, including the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the High Museum of Art, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the British Museum, Le FRAC Lorraine, the Walker Art Center, the Newark Museum of Art, Yale University Art Gallery, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the New York Public Library, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Allen Memorial Art Gallery at Oberlin College, the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for the Visual Arts at Stanford University, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the National Gallery of Art, among others.

-Written by Jehan Mullin