Willie Cole is interested in the concept of “Oneness,” which he describes as repeating one object obsessively as a building block to make any and many objects. He subverts his recurring symbols of servitude—irons and ironing boards—by the context in which he uses them. Irons appear again in his images, taking the association one step further with the concept of “heat.”

On his first visit to Tamarind in 2005, he drew on regional associations. “Where am I?” he asked. “I’m in the land of Georgia O’Keeffe. There are flowers in the air!” and inventively constructed flower images from the patterns on the bottom of steam irons. In 2012, Cole visited Tamarind for a third time to participate in the project Afro: Black Identity in the United States and Brazil.

His work is in numerous public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, in New York; Whitney Museum of American Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, in Chicago; Walker Art Center, in Minneapolis; the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, DC among many others. 

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