-
Animal Rights, 1988-present
Usually an artist is known for only one body of work, but I’m lucky that I’m known for two: the ongoing project about animal rights and the rape painting, which is now at MoMA PS1. The former work continues, and I’m always learning. As I see it, animals liberate themselves. They need our help, but it’s not Lord and Lady Bountiful saving them. I’m aghast at how animal rights today have become all about the human diet—about being gluten-free. Animal liberation is a social-justice issue, and I’ve always promoted the abolitionist approach: eradication of all use. But now animal rights have been twisted into the market, where the meat industry disrupts itself by buying up vegan food producers.
-
Tragedy of War
"Ms. Coe sees the visual arts as more expressive than movies or television in conveying the horrors of war, and the print medium as reaching a wider audience than painting. She began her series with the bombing of Kosovo and finished it as the Middle East went ballistic. The blunt, mostly black-and-white imagery, obviously cued by Goya and as theatrically overstated as war itself, leaves no atrocity unvisited, from the rape of a child by soldiers as her agonized parents watch to lines of refugees marching through indifferent streets." Grace Glueck, 'The Tragedy of War' exhibition review, New York Times, 1999.
-
Ecocide
"My art gets to eat here,” remarked Max Beckmann in the First World War, which he considered a ‘national misfortune.' This quote from Beckmann I would expand upon, to suggest global monopoly capitalism has become the planet’s terrible misfortune. Our art has no choice but to eat the visual trough of political, social, environmental devastation, instigated by venal grifters, the bullies, the thug capitalist class. To be silent in the face of such murderous injustice to all life is to be complicit. Artists consume this poison and regurgitate it, as their contribution to The Resistance. It’s what artists have always done throughout history: Be the canary in the coal mine. Economics is the crime, and the time is soon….when the singing, drawing and painting stop, it’s too late.
-
Months Series
Individual woodcut images from The Months series will be made available on-line as the prints are completed. The plan is one print for each month of the year.
-
The AIDS Series, 1994
The AIDS series came out of a series of visits to the Infectious Disease Ward at the Institute of Medical Humanities in Galveston, Texas. Few outsiders had ever been inside the Galveston AIDS ward, to which Coe was admitted, in a gesture of great trust, by her friend the doctor and artist Eric Avery. Once there, she encountered suffering on a scale for which, she readily admits, she was not properly prepared. In their utter helplessness, the AIDS patients achieve a kind of moral innocence that evokes for Coe the primordial beauty of humanity; to witness this beauty being destroyed is unberable. Worst still, it is hard for the artist to imagine that her work could do much to alleviate the situation, for the doctors themselves expressed constant frustration with the relentless progress of the disease. Capitalism's insatiable hunger for profits, in Coe's view, has created the widespread environmental poisoning that some blame for the breakdown of the human immune system, and has also denied adequate health care to AIDS' most desperate victims: the citizens of third-world countries (where the infection rate can approach 50%) and the poor in our own extremely rich nation.
-
Recent Work: The Era of Authoritarianism (2016-present)
A series of prints made at the time a criminal grifter in the form of POTUS, attempted to defraud the United States, and obstruct the workings of government. His legions undermining local and federal elections, utilizing far reaching conspiracies, with the intent of returning to power in 2022 and 2024. The prints were disseminated in the media and in pamphlet form, inspired by Grosz and Heartfield working for AIZ.
-
Steve Murray, Printer
Steve Murray has been working as Sue Coe's printer since the late 1970s. Outside of taking one media class at SVA many decades ago, Steve is a self-taught printmaker. Steve has had many jobs over the years, from working as a clown with Barnum to being a taxi and school bus driver. Coe's early prints are stamped with a "Sue Coe/Steve Murray" chop mark. Recently Steve developed his own chop, a bird in flight, along with his last name, "Murray."Unless otherwise noted, all prints are published by the artist in conjunction with printer Steve Murray.
-
