“I didn’t choose the steam iron, the steam iron chose me.”
—Willie ColeSince the late 1980’s Willie Cole has employed the steam iron as an unconventional tool for imagemaking, scorching decorative patterns reminiscent of African motifs onto a range of surfaces. Though Cole’s mother and grandmother were housekeepers and often asked him to fix their broken irons, Cole’s artistic fascination with this device of domesticity began when he spotted an iron on the street near his studio in Newark, flattened and discarded. Immediately, the artist recognized similarities between the pattern of the iron’s plate and the design of an African mask, specifically those of the Dan people of Liberia. The Dan understood their masks to be spiritually charged, and Cole soon began to investigate the iron’s own spirituality. “Untangling and understanding the physicality of the iron eventually led to seeking a way to express the spirituality of the iron as well,” Cole explained. “Spiritually, as I defined it then, was the unseen life force that gives expression to all things. And in the case of the iron, that life force was heat, and the evidence of that heat was the scorch."
Dan, Dean Gle Mask, late 19th–early 20th century. Brooklyn Museum, New York. Image: Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Evelyn K. Kossak, 80.244 In Domestic Shield I, Cole appropriates the iron’s function, superheating its plate to scorch an ironing board in an act of mark making. In his deployment of these overlapping scorches, the iron and ironing board become a metaphor ripe with historical and personal associations, utilized to recall Cole’s African American heritage: the distinct patterns of tribal markings found on masks, shields, and fabrics, the crowded masses of Africans brought to America on slave ships, the branding of slaves to demarcate ownership, and the continued domestic labor of Black women, including Cole’s housekeeper relatives. By summoning the iron’s spirit – heat – Cole sublimates the appliance into an object of gendered domesticity, racial symbolism, and powerfully transcendent artistry.
Provenance
Brooke Alexander Gallery, New York
Exhibited
Brooke Alexander Gallery, New York, Willie Cole, April 8 - May 16, 1992
Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Undomesticated Interiors, October 17, 2003 - January 18, 2004
University of Pittsburg, University Art Gallery, A Sense of Place: Contemporary African-American Art, October 6 - December 9, 2005
Montclair Art Museum, Sheldon, New Jersey; Memorial Art Museum, Lincoln, Nebraska; Memorial Art Gallery, Rochester, New York; Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama; Frye Art Museum, Seattle; Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford University, California, Anxious Objects: Willie Cole's Favorite Brands, March 5, 2006 - January 6, 2008
Albertine Monroe Brown Gallery, Kalamazoo, Western Michigan University; Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina at Greensboro; College of Wooster Art Museum, Ebert Art Center; Faulconer Gallery, Grinnell College Museum of Art; Houghton College, Complex Conversations: Willie Cole Sculptures and Wall Works, January 10, 2013 - October 15, 2014Literature
Smith College Museum of Art, Undomesticated Interiors, 2003, no. 5, p. 73
Montclair Art Museum, Anxious Objects: Willie Cole's Favorite Brands, 2006, no. 8, p. 43
48
Domestic Shield I
1992
Scorched canvas and cloth on wood, with ironing board legs, coated with resin and wax.
96 x 16 x 3 in. (243.8 x 40.6 x 7.6 cm)
Signed and dated in black ink on the reverse.
Estimate
$8,000 - 12,000
Sold for $7,874
Editions & Works on Paper
New York Auction 12 February 2025
10
This lot is no longer available.
149
This lot is no longer available.
