Join the noted contemporary American sculptor, printer, and conceptual artist Willie Cole for an opening discussion and reception for his new exhibition, Beauties.

Beauties are haunting full-scale prints made from crushed and hammered ironing boards, each named after a woman from the artist’s cultural and ancestral history. Cole has used irons and ironing as central motifs in his work for 30 years, evoking everything from African masks and slave-ship diagrams to the routines of domestic servitude. In this special installation, the gallery will be lined wall to wall with the Beauties. Standing silently—like sentinels, tombstones, shrouds, or windows—the prints will open a space for confronting the whole range of contradictory energies running through them: resistance and oppression, beauty and violence, labor and forebearance.

Cole will be joined in conversation by Cole Rogers, a master printer, and Jennifer Roberts, the Johnson-Kulukundis Family Faculty Director of the Arts at the Radcliffe Institute and the Elizabeth Cary Agassiz Professor of the Humanities in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

The event is free and open to the public. Reception to follow.

Please visit the 'External Link' below for more information and the registration form for this event.