Willie Cole

Willie Cole (American, born 1955) is best known for assembling and transforming ordinary domestic and used objects such as irons, ironing boards, high-heeled shoes, hair dryers, bicycle parts, and recycled plastic water bottles into imaginative and powerful works of art and installations.

Cole’s widely recurring symbolic and artistic object that was initially brought to the attention of the art world in the 1980s has been the steam iron. His unique approach of imprinting the steam iron’s marks on a variety of media result in a wide-ranging decorative potential of his scorchings, to be viewed as a reference to his African American heritage. Through the repetitive use of single objects in multiples, Cole’s assembled sculptures acquire a transcending and renewed metaphorical meaning, or become a critique of our consumer culture. Cole’s work combines references and appropriation ranging from African and African American imagery, to Dada’s readymades and Surrealism’s transformed objects.

Willie Cole’s work is found in numerous private and public collections and museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim Museum; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, New York among others.