Since 2004, UMFA’s Young Benefactors membership organization has annually purchased a contemporary work of art for inclusion into the museum’s permanent collection. Each year, the Young Benefactors, in conjunction with Jill Dawsey, curator of modern and contemporary art, selects a handful of artists to consider for support by the membership group.
Three artists stood in the forefront for consideration in this year’s acquisitional contest: Jeff Brouws, a photographer, Willie Cole, a mixed media artist and Cindy Craig, a painter. When the dust finally settled and the tallies were locked in, Willie Cole’s “How Do You Spell America? #8” (1993) became UMFA’s newest showpiece for its budding contemporary art collection. Artists under consideration for next year’s Young Benefactors acquisition include Edgar Arceneaux, Trevor Paglen and Amy Sillman.
“How Do You Spell America? #8” is a chalkboard with “AMERICA” spelled out across the top. Beneath each letter are 15 words that begin with the letter they are positioned under. Read vertically, and the words have a vague homology. For instance, under the letter C, Consumer, Choice and Can’t reveal the ambiguity that purchasing power entails. Read horizontally, and the words that create the artwork are reminiscent of headlines from the prescient historical past8212;calling out to themes of war, poverty and everything in between.
It is no accident Cole chooses to represent America through a chalkboard. The chalkboard symbolizes America’s own educational issues as it inverts the standard chalk-and-blackboard.
Prior to becoming a sculptor and painter, Cole was a writer in New York. As he moved deeper into the art scene there, he found he had less and less time to write. To continue writing, he decided to incorporate the written word into his art.
“I made (the “How Do You Spell America?” series) by sitting in front of the television news and writing down all the words said by the news pundits that began with the letters A, M, E, R, I, C or A,” said Cole. “I (also) went through The New York Times with a Hi-Liter using the same approach and created a lot of sentences. I did so many of them8212;it’s a big series8212;that eventually I could make them up as I went along.”
The genesis for the series started before 1993 and had its roots in writing screenplays. After going to an arts and music high school, Cole was accepted into a stage theater program, which opened him up to the intersection of the visual and lingual.
“In the ’80s, I saw a movie that just seemed so easy…so easy to see myself doing something like that, so I switched to writing screenplays,” Cole said.
Through their form, screenplays combine the imaginative free play of language with the visual structure of its medium either through film, theater or performance. It is his translator’s knack for being able to move between these different registers that gives Cole a unique and topical timeliness.
In considering Cole for the Young Benefactors support, Dawsey and the membership group worked together to find a piece of artwork that visually invoked the theme of landscape.
“(Cole’s work) frequently incorporates found objects and commonplace materials, transforming them in innovative and evocative ways,” Dawsey said. “It does not depict the American landscape literally, but instead conjures it up through word play and association. In addition, the work was made in the early 1990s, in wake of the first Gulf War, and it remains relevant to our own moment, 15 years later.”
Cole will come to speak at the Dumke Auditorium on Nov. 6 at 6:30 p.m. on behalf of the Young Benefactors and the art history department to address the last work in his eight part series “How Do You Spell America.” Cole will also talk about the current political climate as well as responding to selected art works of his own. Don’t expect your standard didactic speech on art history, as Cole moves through his talk in more spontaneous and engaging ways.