Willie Cole: On Site features 13 artworks, a video, and includes a site specific installation of a massive chandelier made of recycled water bottles that the artist will create on-site at the David C. Driskell Center at the University of Maryland in the fall of 2016. The traveling exhibition is curated by Dorit Yaron at the David Driskell Center.
Willie Cole (b. 1955, Newark, NJ) attended the Boston University School of Fine Arts, and received his BFA degree from the School of the Visual Arts in New York in 1976. He continued his studies at the Art Students League of New York Art from 1976-79. Recent solo exhibitions include James Gallery of the City University of New York; Memphis Brooks Museum of Art; and Rowan University Art Gallery. A retrospective exhibition, Anxious Objects: Willie Cole’s Favorite Brands, was organized by the Montclair Art Museum in 2006 and traveled nationally. Cole is the recipient of many awards, including the David C. Driskell Prize in 2006, the first national award to honor and celebrate contributions to the field of African American art and art history established by the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. Cole is represented by Alexander and Bonin, New York. Willie Cole was born in 1955 in Somerville, New Jersey and continues to live and work in that state.
His work has been the subject of several one-person museum exhibitions: Montclair Art Museum (2006), University of Wyoming Art Museum (2006), the Tampa Museum of Art (2004), Miami Art Museum (2001), Bronx Museum of the Arts (2001) and the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1998). Several of his sculptures were included in “Reconfiguring an African Icon: Odes to the Mask by Modern and Contemporary Artists from Three Continents,” which opened in March 2011 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In 2015 three current exhibitions are: Willie Cole, Mazmanian Gallery, Framingham State University, Framingham, MA
Flawlessly Feminine, Women Who Graced the Cover and Works by Willie Cole, The Diggs Gallery of Winston-Salem State University
Willie Cole: Transformations, Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts, University of Alabama at Birmingham.