Think Outside the Box Franklin Plaza, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 2024 Commissioned public sculpture. Painted plywood, interactive elements. 8 x 8 x 8 feet.

The cube is a form Cooley has returned to before. Two decades earlier, participating in the annual Omamori group exhibitions at Gallery Maronie in Kyoto, he made a series of small digitally created cubes, hand-held in scale, each carrying his face on one side and a visual illusion within. He kept one. When he made Think Outside the Box for Franklin Plaza in Chapel Hill in 2024, the resemblance was clear: the same form, the same face, the same principle of something hidden inside. What had been held in the palm was now eight feet on each side and planted in a public street.

The commission came from the Town of Chapel Hill and the Chapel Hill Downtown Partnership, for the town's Small Town Pride celebrations. Cooley consulted with members of local LGBTQIA+ organizations during the making of the piece, drawing on his own experience as a queer artist as much as theirs.

Each of the cube's five sides carries imagery from a different body of work. One face holds the Hearts of Love panel, a grid of hearts, each a different color against a different ground, the same form repeated across the surface in every combination. Another carries the People of Boro Land panel, a procession of patchwork figures moving in profile beneath a wide rainbow arc. The You Belong, You Matter panel radiates outward from a central spinning disc, human silhouettes in every color reaching toward a shared core. The Rainbow Circle, on the flat top of the cube, is visible only from above or in photographs: concentric bands of color pulling inward to white.

The fourth side is the one that stops people. A grayscale face stares out from a field of racing multicolored stripes, wide-eyed, open-mouthed. It is Cooley's own face, as Electra Raygun, the drag persona he has inhabited for over thirty years and first brought to Japanese stages, where he performed as the first professional foreign drag artist in the country. The phrase Think Outside the Box runs above in bold lettering, though the face has already said it.

Built into the cube's flush surfaces are peepholes that bend light at different angles, each one reframing the plaza and street outside. Strings run inside the structure, connecting listeners on opposite sides. The spinning disc on the You Belong, You Matter panel turns at a touch. Nothing protrudes from the surface; everything operates from outside and lives within.

The sculpture was unveiled ahead of Chapel Hill's Pride Promenade in June 2024 and remained in the plaza long after, accumulating the ordinary life of a public street.