Benefit Prints
Willie Cole, Bush Burn, 2002
Willie Cole, Bush Burn, 2002, lithograph and metallic powder, 15 x 13½ in., edition of 60
Price
$750 $200
CAA individual and institutional members
$1,000 $300
Nonmembers
Add $50 for shipping and handling
About the Work
Willie Cole works in a range of media to produce images that focus particularly on the metaphoric transformation of found objects and common subjects. His transformations can be spiritual, personal, or social in their significance, and often show a highly charged critical point of view that takes on dominant economic and political structures in history and modern society. He has addressed questions of race, consumerism, class, gender, sex, and contemporary society in a number of important works.
In Bush Burn, a lithograph first offered in 2006, the artist responds to what he perceives as the excesses of US executive authority in the post-9/11 world as embodied in the Patriot Act and the war in Iraq. The burning bush is, of course, a reference to the moment in which Moses was commanded by God to rescue the Israelites from bondage in Egypt; here, though, the visual and conceptual pun on “bush” refers to both the godlike authority claimed by President George W. Bush and his pronouncement of apparently unassailable laws passed down to the populace as a whole.
Cole is also interested in using this religious symbol to play on the idea of Bush having a “burning” agenda that he pursues with utmost persistence. The iconic and symbolic nature of the image is reinforced through the iconographic references, such as the thirteen stars signaling a foundational moment of US political culture as well as the formal qualities of symmetry and clarity of color. The print also signals the artist’s interest in other kinds of transformations, given that fire—as one of the most basic of natural elements—not only destroys and consumes but also clears a space for future possibilities, renewed growth, and change.
Cole studied at the School of Visual Arts and the Art Students League, both in New York. He has held residences at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, and has received many awards, including the 2006 David C. Driskell Prize from the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia. Cole’s sculptures, installations, prints, and other artworks have been featured in many prominent exhibitions and in major collections of art, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York. A survey of his work, Anxious Objects: Willie Cole’s Favorite Brands, organized by the Montclair Art Museum in Montclair, New Jersey, toured nationally from 2006 to 2008.
Bush Burn was produced at the Rutgers Center for Innovative Print and Paper (renamed the Brodsky Center for Innovative Editions in 2006) in New Brunswick, New Jersey, with the collaborating master printer, Eileen M. Foti.
Contact
For more information or to purchase this print, please contact Hannah O’Reilly Malyn, CAA development associate, at 212-392-4435.
