The artist invited the community in Newark to reimagine objects that would otherwise be destined for a landfill — to look at them in a fresh, imaginative way.
Willie Cole in his artist-in-residence studio at Express Newark, where he has been assembling chandeliers made from thousands of used plastic bottles. Photo by Rachel Vanni
NEWARK — The artist Willie Cole has created two colossal new sculptures and generated a provocative group exhibition stemming from an unusual open call asking artists to transform objects destined for landfill into something imaginative and new.
The resulting works are in two exhibitions on view at Express Newark, the center for socially engaged art and design affiliated with Rutgers University — Newark, where Cole, 68, is an artist in residence. They speak to his longtime practice of using ready-made objects as raw materials, and his preoccupation with environmental crises.
Cole’s own show, “Spirit Catcher and Lumen-less Lantern,” consists of two chandelier-like works, each assembled from more than 3,000 used plastic water bottles collected in Newark, where Cole grew up in the 1960s.
The forms, woven together with metal wire on-site during his residency, with help from Rutgers students and Newark neighbors, speak to Cole’s frustration with the results of the city’s yearslong water crisis: In 2019, the Environmental Protection Agency deemed the city’s water unsafe to drink, and Newark began replacing about 23,000 lines of aging lead pipes. Cole was impelled to address the crisis through his artworks, and specifically the next problem: what to do with the thousands of single-use plastic water bottles distributed by the city, which contribute to the cycle of toxicity and pollution.