Five Beauties Rising: New Prints by Willie Cole

Highpoint is honored to present a significant new body of work by internationally renowned artist Willie Cole. The works created in collaboration with Highpoint Editions include 27 intaglio and relief prints of ironing boards.

Five of these are sold as a limited edition suite entitled Five Beauties Rising (pictured above). The tall and narrow ironing board prints are each titled with a female name printed in relief at the lower edge. Savannah, Dot, Fannie Mae, Queen, and Anna Mae — names that hint at an earlier time. For Cole these names are a metaphorical link — even a shout out — to his African American lineage. The other 22 ironing board prints are available individually in very limited editions.

The exhibition will be a unique opportunity to view the ironing board prints as an installation as the artist intended in Highpoint’s AIA award-winning galleries. Hung together, they take on a chapel-like quality, the prints evoking church windows or grave markers conveying a richly complex history by way of Cole’s personal iconography. Also on view will be a series of small and large screenprinted iron patterns juxtaposed in eye-popping colors, as well as a large woodcut depicting two female forms comprised of women’s high heeled shoes and echoing themes and techniques Cole has employed in his sculptural work. In Cole’s past work iron patterns have recalled African tribal markings and shields; ironing boards have represented slave ships.

Please Join us for the Opening Evening with artist Willie Cole on Friday, September 14, 6:30 – 9:00 p.m. Exhibition on view September 14 – October 13, 2012. HP Gallery admission is free and open to the public Monday – Friday 9:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m., Saturdays 12:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.