Willie Cole
Arts/Industry: Pottery, 2000
Willie Cole is known for his mixed-media sculptures focusing on the cultures of West Africa. His upbringing by both his mother and grandmother in the 1960s has had a lasting impact on his work, as his continued use of irons in his sculptures signifies the domestic role of African women during this time.
Cole has received many awards for his work, including the Penny McCall Foundation Grant in 1991, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant in 1995, the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award in 1996, the David C. Driskell Prize in 2006, and Timehri Award for Leadership in the Arts in 2009. In 2004, Cole received the Lamar Dodd Fellowship at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia. Cole served as an artist-in-residence at several institutions, including the Pilchuck Glass School in Seattle, Washington; the Contemporary in Baltimore, Maryland; the Capp Street Project in San Francisco, California; and Arts/Industry at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin.
His work has been the subject of several one-person museum exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1998); Bronx Museum of the Arts (2001); Miami Art Museum (2001); Tampa Museum of Art (2004), University of Wyoming Art Museum (2006); Montclair Art Museum (2006); and College of Wooster Art Museum (2013–14).
In 2015, Cole’s work was included in Represent: 200 Years of African American Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Wild Noise: Artwork from the Bronx Museum of the Arts at El Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana. In 2016, his work was included in Disguise: Masks and Global African Art at the Brooklyn Museum. Willie Cole: On-Site opened at the David C. Driskell Center, University of Maryland, and traveled to the Museum of Art at the University of New Hampshire and Arthur Ross Gallery, Philadelphia in 2016. The following year, Cole had solo exhibitions at the Snite Museum of Art at the University of Notre Dame and at the College of Architecture and Design Gallery at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. In 2019, Willie Cole: Beauties opened at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University and Willie Cole: Bella Figura opened at Alexander and Bonin, New York.
