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Willie Cole, visiting professor and artist, will lecture about his work | |
| By Dana Vannoy |
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As the Dodd Professor, Cole will teach both graduate- and undergraduate-level students, providing them the opportunity to interact with a highly successful artist who has worked primarily outside academe. His term here will culminate in a collaborative exhibition with his students that will open April 14, 2005. Cole first came to UGA in February 2002 to give a visiting artist lecture for the School of Art. His standing-room-only presentation gave students, teachers and the general public insight into Cole’s art-making process and his interest in found objects and a historical review of Elegba, the Yoruba god of the crossroads and the subject of his interactive installation The Elegba Principle. Drawing on his extensive knowledge of African art history, Cole creates prints, assemblages and installations that reveal connections between African spiritual traditions, domestic work, slavery and consumerism. His work often consists of, or is created through, discarded domestic objects—irons, ironing boards, hair dryers and women’s shoes. He says that these previously used items carry with them some of the spirit of the original user. “I made a conscious choice in 1989 to work with objects that had been handled . . . because of energy transference, which to me has to do with telekinesis and chi transfers,” Cole said in an interview in Sculpture magazine in January/February 2001. “Thousands of hands have touched them, and if an iron or a door could talk, it would speak about the hand that touched it that day.” Cole’s work can be found in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York (where he had a solo show in 1998), the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Yale University Gallery and the New York Public Library. He has earned a Joan Mitchell Foundation Award, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant, a Wheeler Foundation Grant and the Penny McCall Foundation Grant. He has served in several artist-in-residence programs, including the Capp Street Project in San Francisco and the Studio Museum in Harlem. Represented by Alexander and Bonin, New York, he shows frequently across the United States and in France, in both solo and group exhibitions. His Sources and Metamorphoses ran through April 4 of this year in a two-month exhibition at the Tampa Museum of Art in Florida. Since earning his B.F.A. from the School of Visual Arts in New York, Cole has shown at Studio Museum in Harlem; the Institute for Contemporary Arts, P.S. 1, Long Island City; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art at Champion; the Palais des Expositions, Nice, and the City Gallery at Chastain, Atlanta, among others. |
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