Kevin Cole transforms personal memory and African American history into exuberant compositions that move between painting and sculpture. Best known for his colorful, twisting forms derived from neckties, he creates works in which visual celebration carries a deeper reflection on racial injustice, faith, and survival. Born in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, Cole earned his undergraduate degree in art education at the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, followed by graduate degrees at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and Northern Illinois University. In 1985, he settled in the Atlanta area, where teaching became an enduring part of his career alongside his studio practice.

The necktie entered Cole’s artistic vocabulary through a formative encounter with his grandfather. When the eighteen-year-old Cole questioned the importance of registering to vote, his grandfather took him to a tree associated with stories of African American men lynched while attempting to exercise that right. The account left a lasting impression, giving an ordinary article of clothing profound significance. In Cole’s work, the tie evokes dignity, aspiration, and the violence used to deny Black citizenship. Its transformation into an animated, abstract form also conveys resilience and self-determination.

Cole’s distinctive visual language extends across paintings, works on paper, and sculptural constructions. In the work illustrated here, turquoise, yellow, pink, and orange forms curl and intersect against richly patterned black and white passages. Overlapping contours create the illusion of ribbons twisting through space, while stripes, crosshatching, and repeated marks establish a lively visual rhythm. This interplay of color and line connects with Cole’s longstanding interest in music, particularly the improvisational structures of jazz and the expressive force of gospel and blues. His palette also draws on African textiles and memories of quilts made by his mother and grandmother. As a member of AfriCOBRA, he carries these influences into an artistic practice rooted in cultural affirmation, joining the pleasures of abstraction with the weight of personal and collective history.

His public commissions include the Coca-Cola Centennial Olympic Mural for the 1996 Atlanta Games and Soul Ties That Matter, a fifty-five-foot installation created for Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport in 2018. His work is represented in the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, and the Georgia Museum of Art, which honored him with its Larry D. and Brenda A. Thompson Award in 2020.

The breadth of Cole’s practice was explored in Pushing Forward: Politics, Social Conflict, and the Racial Divide in the Art of Kevin Cole, presented by the University of Maryland Global Campus in 2024–2025. Across his paintings, drawings, and sculptural constructions, family history becomes a means of examining collective experience. His work holds sorrow and joy together, giving histories of struggle an expressive language grounded in hope, spiritual conviction, and the possibility of renewal.