Dec 10, 2020 - Sale 2554

Sale 2554 - Lot 204

Price Realized: $ 3,250
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,500 - $ 2,500
WILLIE COLE (1955 - )
The Ogun Sisters.

Color screenprint with solar plates and glazing on BFK Rives, 2012. 762x562 mm; 30x22 1/8 inches (sheet). Artist's proof, aside from the edition of 75. Signed, titled, dated, numbered 9/20 and inscribed "A/P" in pencil, lower margin. Published by The Experimental Print Institute, Lafayette College, Easton, PA, in collaboration with Hummingbird Press Editions, Massachusetts.

Provenance: acquired from Hummingbird Press, Chicago; private collection, Illinois.

Cole describes this recent print, bordered by steam iron impressions, as 'a collection of symbols.' The artistexplains 'the top symbol is the Haitian veve [sign] for oGUN, the Yoruba deity whose element is iron. The bottom symbol represents the chemical element iron as a mix of protons and neutrons.' Cole's central pair of uniformed, ironing women each have a same circle above their hearts representing the proton and neutron mixture of iron shown enlarged below. The image of the ironing woman derives from an archival photo dating from the early 1950s of a single female student at Manual Training and Industrial School for Colored Youths in Bordentown, New Jersey, where Cole's aunt was a student. This coed, state-funded boarding school, which closed in 1955, was a northern version of Alabama's famed Tuskegee institute. The heads of the ironing women are classic masks of the Dan people, based in the central west coast of Africa in what are now Liberia and the Ivory Coast. By duplicating and flipping the photo of the ironing woman, Cole creates a third figure in the middle, which he sees as 'medical, like he's laid out on the table, all dressed in white and being resuscitated by the heat from their irons.'