Proctor Silex (Evidence and Presence)

Born in Somerville, New Jersey, Willie Cole attended art school in Boston and at the School of Visual Arts and the Art Students League in New York. An extraordinarily inventive sculptor, conceptual artist, and printmaker, Cole transforms discarded mass-produced objects-irons, hair dryers, bicycle parts, high-heeled shoes-into visually moving works of art that incorporate symbols of power, evoke memory, and relate to his own personal experiences.

As a young man, Cole repaired irons for female relatives who worked as housekeepers. In 1989, the year the AMAM assemblage was made, he began to incorporate steam irons into his work, both as found objects and as mark-making tools. In Proctor Silex (Evidence and Presence), Cole dissects and transforms a steam iron into a spirit mask, evokes a slave ship by incorporating an ironing board, and suspends a canvas scorched with the patterns created by the hot face of the iron. Hinting at a range of possible meanings, Cole's symbolically infused objects pay homage to the formal qualities of traditional African sculpture and the spiritual worlds they evoke.

Over the next decade, Cole's steam irons became a personal iconography-even "a personal brand," as he himself called them-that he explored in an ever-broader range of media and in which he even occasionally incorporated his own image. The AMAM also owns Cole's triptych Man, Spirit, and Mask, made in 1999, which consists of three large prints that refer to the "scarification" process of the artist's face and transformation of an iron into a mask. Using a Proctor Silex iron, Cole branded or "scarified" an image of his face through a photo-etching plate that was hand-colored and embossed. The artist's inventive and rich interweaving of metaphor nimbly addresses themes of religious ritual, domestic labor, and his own personal appropriation and creation of Africanized forms.