Newark Museums's Virtual Community Day: Celebrating Earth

Wille Cole joined the Newark Museum of Art’s Virtual Community Day to talk about his recent work “The Water Bottle Giant.” Made up of 10,000 water bottles collected and assembled with the help of the community, this work highlights issues such as the lack of clean drinking water and accumulation of plastic waste.

Mr. Cole continues to be available for virtual bookings during this time, including, but not limited to, conferences, artist talks, critique sessions, and portfolio reviews. Please see here for more details.

MFA’s ‘Elsa Dorfman’ and ‘Personal Space’ exhibits are powerful examples of the evolution of self-portraiture

BOSTON - Advertising and documentary photographer Elliott Erwitt once said, “The whole point of taking pictures is so you don’t have to explain things with words.”

He might have been describing two intriguing exhibits about portrait photography at the Museum of Fine Arts that have more in common than meets viewers’ eye.

Organized to complement the groundbreaking examination of British painter Lucian Freud’s self-portraits, “Elsa Dorfman: Me and My Camera” and the group show “Personal Space: Self-Portraits on Paper,” have used self-portraiture to express their varied identities in unpredictable ways.

Willie Cole’s photo etching “Man Spirit Mask” uses household items like a steam iron to create a mirror image of half his face marked with African scarification and ritualistic tattooing to forge a powerful meditation on race and identity.

Read more.

Artists, museum exhibition to commemorate 1st documented Africans in America

Fully honoring the diverse history of colonial America, is the 1619/2019 exhibition at the Muscarelle Art Museum in Williamsburg, Virginia. Featuring work by Sonya Clark, Nell Painter, Katrina Andry, Sedrick Huckaby, Preston Jackson, Delita Martin, Willie Cole, Letitia Huckaby, Bear Allison and others, the exhibition, which runs through January 26th, includes work from not only African American artists, but also Native American artists.

Very thought-provoking is the Dadaist-influenced reimagining of the ironing board in “Savannah, Dot, Fannie Mae, Queen, Anna Mae” by Willie Cole, a School of The Visual Arts graduate whose work often includes tools of domesticity.