The artist invited the community in Newark to reimagine objects that would otherwise be destined for a landfill — to look at them in a fresh, imaginative way.
The artist Willie Cole has created two colossal new sculptures and generated a provocative group exhibition stemming from an unusual open call asking artists to transform objects destined for landfill into something imaginative and new.
The resulting works are in two exhibitions on view at Express Newark, the center for socially engaged art and design affiliated with Rutgers University — Newark, where Cole, 68, is an artist in residence. They speak to his longtime practice of using ready-made objects as raw materials, and his preoccupation with environmental crises.
Cole’s own show, "Spirit Catcher and Lumen-less Lantern," consists of two chandelier-like works, each assembled from more than 3,000 used plastic water bottles collected in Newark, where Cole grew up in the 1960s.
The forms, woven together with metal wire on-site during his residency, with help from Rutgers students and Newark neighbors, speak to Cole’s frustration with the results of the city’s yearslong water crisis: In 2019, the Environmental Protection Agency deemed the city's water unsafe to drink, and Newark began replacing about 23,000 lines of aging lead pipes. Cole was impelled to address the crisis through his artworks, and specifically the next problem: what to do with the thousands of single-use plastic water bottles distributed by the city, which contribute to the cycle of toxicity and pollution.
While Cole was making the water-bottle sculptures with Rutgers students in his apprentice-style studio workshop, he generated a creative prompt asking them to choose and disassemble a found object “into as many pieces as possible” and then invent something new from those pieces. His fellow teacher, Colleen Gutwein O'Neal, adapted the prompt into an open call for artists in the region.
The result is a modest exhibition of sculptures by jury-selected artists presented alongside Rutgers students. Curated by O’Neal, it is on view through June 30 at Express Newark. (The director, Salamishah Tillet, is a New York Times critic at large.)
Like Cole’s water bottles, many of the objects on view — formerly a flashlight, a lamp, a wall clock, a record player, a fan, hair dryers — include plastics and other hard-to-recycle materials.
For years, Cole has worked with discarded objects such as shoes (his sculpture “Shine,” made from black high-heeled pumps, is on view in the Mteropolitan Museum's Afrofuturist room) and steam irons. Last year, in New York, he presented a solo show of sculptures made from guitars.
Cole’s newest commission, titled “Ornithology,” will be unveiled at the new Kansas City International Airport, which officially opens Tuesday. Cole incorporated 164 saxophones to hatch a flock of 12 bird sculptures in homage to the jazz legend and locally born hero Charlie (Bird) Parker. He called the project “a real career goose,” laughing at his pun.
During the remaining months of his residency, Cole, who also has work on view at the Knoxville Museum of Art as part of the inaugural Tennessee Triennial (through May 7), invited community members and visitors to make additional sculptures with donated water bottles. He plans for those works to debut in June as part of his new public art commission along Park Avenue in Manhattan, for the Fund for Park Avenue.
It’s not always easy to “open up perception” and see familiar objects in a fresh way, Cole says. He urges students to break things and draw each broken part, to examine its silhouette and to reimagine its scale. “You have to look at everything to see what you’re reminded of,” Cole stresses. “Everything can be anything.”
