Providence, Rhode Island–based artist Dave Cole blurs the lines between homespun and manufactured, innocent and subversive, nostalgic and postindustrial in his knitted, quilted, and hand-sewn sculptures that range from three-inch-tall Kevlar booties to a 450-square-foot American flag quilt stitched together from the red, white, and blue areas of the “192 Flags of the World”—the official United Nations set. Cole first became known around 2003 for his series of variously sized lead, Kevlar, and fiberglass teddy bears, but his career surged with Knitting Machine, 2005, a work that utilized John

“WELL, I’LL BE DAMNED!” Standing at the entrance to “Long Life Cool White: Photographs by Moyra Davey”— a survey of the artist’s photographs from the past two decades (and her first museum show), curated by Helen Molesworth—was a fifty-something man in khakis, hands on hips, shaking his head vigorously, grinning, clearly in the pleasurable throes of realizing he had been duped. It seemed that he had just read the wall label for a group of one hundred eight-by-ten C-prints, each placed under Plexiglas and all hung in a neat grid. A lesson in infinitely subtle comparison, every photograph depicts