Born in Somerville, New Jersey, Cole graduated from the School of Visual Arts in New York City in 1976. He subsequently pursued theater and music, but the visual arts became his main focus. By the 1980s objects began to take hold as his primary artistic materials, coinciding with his 1988–89 residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem. The artist has been included in a number of Studio Museum exhibitions since the 1980s, and the Museum’s permanent collection includes works that span two decades of his career.

Cole has had solo presentations at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, David C. Driskell Center at the University of Maryland, Montclair Art Museum, University of Wyoming Art Museum, Bronx Museum of the Arts, and the Museum of Modern Art. His work has appeared in numerous group exhibitions at such institutions as Museo Universitario del Chopo, Mexico City; British Museum; Brooklyn Museum; El Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana; and Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture, Charlotte, North Carolina. Cole has been awarded the David C. Driskell Prize, High Museum of Art, Atlanta (2006), the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award (1996), and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant (1995).