Man Spirit Mask

In this image, Willie Cole uses an iron to connect with painful and lingering histories of racial oppression, commenting on the extent to which the marks of the past live on in the present. The iron, which left a singed impression in the middle panel, suggests domestic service (Cole’s mother and grandmother both worked as housekeepers), but its form also recalls both the European ships that carried captive African laborers to the Americas and historical African masks.

In the first and third panels, Cole superimposes the iron-as-mask image over his own face. By connecting a suggestion of iron marks to his face in the first panel, Cole further evokes the manner in which history has marked his body. He suggests both ritual scarification patterns and the branding irons that turned the bodies of African laborers into Western commodities.