A Special Feature from Summit Public Art!

***A Summit Public Art Exclusive!***

"A Beautiful Thing":

Willie Cole Reflects on Over

Thirty Years in Public Art

Acclaimed NJ Artist to Be Honored

at Summit Public Art Fundraiser

on September 25th

Willie Cole still remembers his first encounter with public art. “I used to sit on the Lincoln statue in front of the Newark courthouse when I was a kid,” he recalls. “It was a regular stop for me because when I walked from the museum, that was halfway home.” That statue, known as Seated Lincoln, sculpted by Mt. Rushmore sculptor Gutzon Borglum in 1911, was just one of many public sculptures Cole got to know as child growing up in Newark. “The public art was like a playground for little kids,” he says. “I always wish my mother had a photo of [me with Lincoln] but nobody took a picture back then.”

The Lincoln statue still occupies the same bench in front of the old Essex County courthouse but these days when Cole visits the nearby Newark Museum, which he visited often as a boy, he’s just as likely to encounter one of his own works of art. One such work, a large contemplative bronze titled The Sole Sitter (pictured right), now greets visitors just beyond the museum’s entrance in roughly the same spot where Cole recalls being awed by a large African sculpture when he was a child. “I would come in the museum in that front door,” he says. “And there was a big African statue there called the 'Nimba,' and now my piece is almost in that location, so that’s almost cosmic to me.”

Today Cole’s art can be found not only in Newark but in the permanent collections of dozens of museums around the country, from the Met to MOMA to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.—and, just as often, in towns like Summit, New Jersey, where one of his sculptures is currently on display on the Village Green. Titled Woman in Heels (pictured below), the large figurative piece demonstrates Cole’s fondness for taking ordinary objects (in this case, the iconic female “power shoe”) and transforming them into something new. The work was brought to the city by Summit Public Art, a city-based nonprofit that has brought more than 100 works of art to public spaces throughout Summit since 2002. Modeled entirely from previously-worn high heels, the kneeling, full-bodied figure immediately attracts notice from passersby and commuters on their way to the nearby train station.

“People will see these things and they’ll walk right by them and only see a pile of shoes,” says Cole. “But then when they turn around and come back, they see something else, they see whatever is, a face or a sitting person, and it’s always a huge reaction. So doing that with large-scale public art is good. It’s a good thing for your health too because it makes your heart beat a little faster in that one moment. You get a rush just from that one experience.”

Cole’s interest in making public art began over thirty years ago when he was a young artist working in New York City. “I was inspired by Christo,” he says, “when he was wrapping buildings and building curtains in Central Park. I had the desire to do one big project every year like that. And I think around maybe 1988 I did a big project called 10,000 Mandelas. I cut out ten—it looked like ten thousand—I made cardboard cutouts of a male with his hands up as if being accosted by police and then some with the hands down and I taped the face of Nelson Mandela via color Xeroxes onto all of them. And I put them all over SoHo and Greenwich Village with a team of people. We had a video crew. We did it in the middle of the night. And we sat and watched people react as the sun came up. But by about seven o’clock the Department of Sanitation was right behind us taking them down. It didn’t last very long,” he recalls with a laugh. “That was where it began for me with the desire to do things out in public. So I started to apply for things and discovered the Percent for Art program and other state and federal organizations offering opportunities. And initially I said I’ll try to do one a year.”

And for many years, Cole did just that, completing large-scale commissions in a variety of mediums for cities and arts programs around the country, from New York to Chicago to his hometown, where he created, among other works, an African-inspired etched glass shield (pictured right) for Newark’s Washington Park station. Yet he admits that after a while he found it difficult to maintain this pace.

“I had the vision of my life standing on a three-legged stool,” Cole says. “And one leg was public commissions. Another one was lectures and artist talks. And the third one was museums and gallery sales. But at some point my art production for the galleries became so time-consuming that I didn’t pursue public art for many years. And just before the pandemic, I started again.”

Cole’s latest collaboration with Summit Public Art is his third with the organization, a relationship that began back in 2014 when he installed two pieces made out of recycled water bottles, one of his first experiments with the medium. “I had no idea that people made art out of water bottles,” he says. “And I Googled it and I didn’t find anything. But maybe my computer was wrong because six months later I saw a lot of artists making things out of water bottles. And I decided my distinction would be the things that I make, not the material."

One of those works, H2O TBX (pictured left), took the shape of a car (“because the bottle was plastic and plastic was oil,” explains Cole) while the other, a large-scale piece titled Ten Thousand Reasons, (pictured below) resembled a tornado. The bottles used to make the sculpture were collected by local students, many of whom likely remember seeing the artist putting the finishing touches on his work during his visits to the Village Green.

“That’s special, too,” says Cole, “that Summit has really supported me with these bottles, because in those years, the bottle was a new medium for me, a new object. And when I made that giant tornado, that was an amazing experience for me.”

Cole says he’s delighted to have his work back on display here in Summit, where he will be the guest of honor for Summit Public Art’s upcoming fundraiser, “An Evening in ‘The City of Art,’” on September 25th. After over thirty years of making public art, he says he's come to appreciate its potential to make a long-lasting impact: “Of course I feel it’s very important. I think of the antiquities of the world, maybe even the wonders of the world, as public art. Some of them are natural, some are man-made. So I think public art can be the indicator of civilization, you know, for centuries or millenniums to come. So it’s very important.”

As an artist, he says, “I like the fact that people who don’t go to museums can see the work. Artists that are in the so-called system of museums and galleries sometimes seem to be almost pigeonholed, you know. They expect you to do something like they saw before. Especially the galleries because they’re trying to build a track record and an identity for you, which I understand. But in public art, because I worked as a graphic designer, for me it’s about solving the client’s needs.... So I like that about it. It forces me to jump out of that comfort zone. To do something totally different.”

"That's what I think the role of public art is. It gives people a sense of release and relief.... It forces you to take a pause. And that's a beautiful thing."

—Willie Cole

When people encounter public art, whether it’s a statue of Lincoln or one of his own sculptures, Cole explains, “it evokes feelings and memories and thoughts for them. And that’s what I think the role of public art is. It gives people a sense of release and relief. Because you walk through a day in the world that you have put into your own mind and now somebody else is knocking on your head with something you’ve never seen before,” he says. “So it forces you to take a pause. And that’s a beautiful thing.”

Willie Cole will be appearing at Summit Public Art's "An Evening in 'The City of Art'" fundraiser on September 25th. For more information or to purchase tickets, please see the link below.

Photos courtesy of Willie Cole (www.williecole.com) except for

photo of Cole and Woman in Heels by Christine Keeley (@christinek_nyc)