Will Cotton, Laurie SImmons at the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum

9 February to 9 June 2019

Included in group exhibition Like Sugar at the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York.

Our taste for sweetness is a powerful force. It is one of the foundations of empires; of slavery; of ecological devastation; and of modern health epidemics and food injustice. Even knowing this, we love it. Flowers and fruits seduce birds and insects with their nectars; for human beings, sugar starts as cane, beets, or corn, and people have harvested and manipulated and packaged it to suit consumers’ fancies. We continually construct and reconstruct its meanings. Like Sugar will explore both the problematic and the joyful aspects of sugar, complicating our view of how this multi-layered substance affects us. Through artwork by contemporary artists such as Vik Muniz, Julia Jacquette, Zineb Sedira, Laurie Simmons, and others; historical materials such as maps, prints, and books; and material culture such as cane-cutting tools and sugar dishes, the show will raise questions and provide a space for dialogue about sugar in our lives.

Will Cotton on ARTSY.NET

29 March 2017

Editorial by Casey Lesser I Baked a Cake in Will Cotton's Candyland Studio on ARTSY.NET.

For the past two decades, cakes, candies, macarons, and other desserts have been omnipresent in Cotton’s work. In realistic portrayals of beautiful women, he’s employed sweets for their seductive allure and symbolic associations, whether to embellish a fantastical candy queen or to emphasize the advertising industry’s keen ability to provoke desire.

Next week, he will be honored at the New York Academy of Art’s annual Tribeca Ball, an event that will dole out “Will Cotton Cotton Candy” to salute the sweet-toothed artist...

Will Cotton at FLAG Art Foundation

9 June to 29 July 2016

Included in group exhibition Summer School at FLAG Art Foundation, NYC, NY.

The FLAG Art Foundation is pleased to present Summer School, on its 9th floor gallery from June 9 – July 29, 2016. This expansive group exhibition highlights artists who ignite our imagination through fantasy, humor, and play. Accompanying educational programming will include artist-led workshops, tours, and events, created with and driven by the interests of children and their families...

Will Cotton at the National Portrait Gallery

22 May 2015 to 10 July 2016

Included in group exhibition Eye Pop: The Celebrity Gaze at the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC.

Brad Pitt, Oprah Winfrey, Katy Perry, Britney Spears, Peter Dinklage, Eminem, Michelle Obama, Sonia Sotomayor, Eva Longoria, Serena Williams, Kobe Bryant, are some of the people featured in "Eye Pop: The Celebrity Gaze." This exhibition features 53 portraits of luminaries who have been at the top of their fields. See them in drawings, paintings, video portraits, photographs, sculpture, and prints. Many of these works of art have never been publicly displayed and all recent additions to the museum's collection. Taken together, these portraits allow us to question celebrity and peel back its layers...

Will Cotton at the Orlando Museum of Art

12 March to 5 June 2016

Solo exhibition InFlux Exhibition Series: Will Cotton at the Orlando Museum of Art, Orlando, Florida.

Presented here is the first ever exhibition examining artist Will Cotton’s entire working process, from concept sketch, to costumes, to prints and paintings. Cotton is known for depicting an astonishing world, composed of an abundance of sugary sweets. Figures pose languidly in settings where landscapes are cakes and icing, seas are whipped cream and clouds are cotton candy. These appear to be utopian realms where all desires are indulged without guilt or consequence. The flawless naturalism with which Cotton renders this idealized world makes it both more seductive and more remote from ordinary experience...

Will Cotton at Baldwin Gallery

27 December 2015 to 7 February 2016

Solo exhibition at Baldwin Gallery, Aspen, Colorado.

Will Cotton in Martha Stewart Living

December 2015

Cover painting for 25th Anniversary issue of Martha Stewart Living.

In his sweet heaven of a studio in downtown Manhattan, Will Cotton works not just with paint and paper and brushes, but with sugar, flour, and egg whites. He also, as artists are wont to do, brings in other materials -- in this case, a flexible and inedible substance with which he embellished my Valentino dress. He transformed it from a lacy summer linen frock into an object worthy of inclusion in his idea of a sugary-white winter wonderland, into which he painted me so artistically and beautifully...