Birth of the Blues, 2025
Woodcut
Edition of 10
14 x 14 in.
Collaborative Printer: Alexis Nutini
Birth of the Blues (14 x 14) returns to one of the most charged images in Willie Cole's practice of the last known ship to bring enslaved Africans to the United States, the Clotilda. Cole had acquired a high-resolution image through the Getty and began working with it first as a sculpture, then as a print. The sculpture was part of a 2022 exhibition at Alexander and Bonin Gallery in New York. This riveting showcase, built entirely around 75 guitars donated by Yamaha, fused with shackled mannequins standing in beds of rice, was an homage to Cole's Gullah Geechee heritage and a meditation on the entanglement of oppression and creativity at the root of American music.
Cole noticed that the yokes placed around the necks of the imprisoned were the same basic shape as a guitar. The connection was immediate. The instrument that became the language of the blues—of resistance and longing, resembles the very instrument of bondage that it opposes.
Working with master printer Alexis Nutini for PrintLab, Cole desired translating the image into a large-scale woodcut. As the oldest print medium in western tradition long associated with books and political messaging, the process could carry the weight of such a heavy and difficult subject. And, because Cole’s vision exceeded what a single sheet could accommodate, the work was ultimately printed in 20 individual panels. This solution resonated with Cole’s lifelong relationship to puzzles, always drawn to the idea of taking parts and assembling them into a whole.
