After winning a Charles Burchfield scholarship in 1976, Kenny Cole studied drawing at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, earning a B.F.A. in 1981. He exhibited extensively in alternative spaces in and around New York City until moving to Maine in 1994. Here he has continued to exhibit in alternative spaces and was awarded the 2012 Spring Monhegan Artists Residency, exhibited an interactive solo installation at the Zillman Art Museum, University of Maine in January 2014 and in 2017 he was awarded a mid career Esther and Adolph Gottlieb Foundation Grant.
"I began my art career with a desire to take on relevant content that could address and engage power structures. Much of my work has since gained an activist perspective in order to begin identifying and defining emerging moral calculi and has lead me to explore; language, a schematic color palette, interactive canvas structures, and silk-screen printing. My attraction to these forms lies in their ability to interpret, archive, and engage in, the immense degree of digital and technological communication prevalent today, while maintaining the resistance of a hand-rendered traditional liquid medium base."