Athens, Ga. – Artist Willie Cole has accepted the position of Lamar Dodd Professorial Chair for the 2004-2005 school year. As the Dodd Chair, he will teach both graduate- and undergraduate-level students, providing them the opportunity to interact with a highly successful artist who has worked primarily outside academia.
He will present a lecture for the Lamar Dodd School of Art Visiting Artist Program at the Georgia Museum of Art on Sept. 28, at 5:30 p.m. in the M. Scott Griffith Auditorium. His term here will culminate in a collaborative exhibition with his students April 14 – May 6, 2005.
Cole first came to the University of Georgia in February 2002 for the Lamar Dodd School of Art Visiting Artist Series. His standing-room-only presentation gave students, teachers and the general public insight into Cole’s art-making process, the events that sparked 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 considers it necessary for these to be previously used items, sensing that they 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,” said Cole in an interview with Sherry Gaché in Sculpture magazine (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 and consistently across the United States and in France, in both solo and group exhibitions. His Sources & Metamorphoses ran through April 4 of this year in a two-month exhibition at the Tampa Museum of Art in Florida.
Since earning his BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York, Cole has shown at Studio Museum in Harlem; Institute for Contemporary Arts, P.S. 1, Long Island City; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art at Champion; Palais des Exposition, Nice; the Tokushima Modern Art Museum, Japan; Galerie Froment & Putman, Paris; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; and the City Gallery at Chastain, Atlanta. In June 2000 his work was shown in the Biennale of Lyons, France.
His work has been reviewed in Art in America, Art in America, Sculpture, Artforum and The New York Times.
