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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Steve Murray, Printer (1944-2025)
Steve passed away in December 2025.
Steve found something in this world he loved doing: making prints.
I met him when he was an all-night cab driver in NYC – a job he loathed. He's the one who gave me the idea of making prints of my drawings, and he would print them himself. He was never trained as a printmaker, apart from a few night classes; he was self-taught. Cab drivers back then lived on their tips, and he saved his to buy a Charles Brand press, which he always said was the best. We did over forty-five years of prints on that press – thousands of them. Etchings and lino cuts, from tiny to large.
We'd go out at night in the yellow cab with our sketchbooks, all over NYC. A cab is invisible, so we went everywhere and drew it all: the social clubs, the neighborhoods, the cops and firefighters, the commercial sex workers, the gay clubs, addicts on heroin, bag ladies eating out of the garbage, kids dumpster diving, the Wall Street suits. He'd drop me off at night court to draw and pick me up after. Fulton Fish Market, the meatpacking district – everywhere and everything. As soon as cabs were allowed downtown,
we drew the smoking ruins of 9/11.Steve was held up at gunpoint a few times. He'd tell them to f-off and chase them down with a knotted sock full of quarters. He was serious about not handing over his tips. It was NYC back in the day – a rough and tumble place.
He also told me about the celebrities who were the cheapest tippers – he despised them – and the ones who tipped the most. Frank Sinatra was the winner, always tipping in hundred-dollar bills. Not just him, either – his wig guy, who carried the wigs from performance to performance in a suitcase on his lap, had clearly been told to tip a hundred dollars too.
Steve rescued animals in the cab. Starving cats, injured pigeons and rats. He always took a fare who had a dog. He also drove working people home after a night shift, out to the outer boroughs – exhausted nurses, mostly. When he finished work, we'd go to an all-night diner on 86th with free coffee refills and talk about art and politics and how to get money, till dawn. I was usually up all night anyway, chasing illustration deadlines.
Steve didn't do anything fancy in printmaking. Just black and white, maybe some red. But he did it perfectly, and fast. It was about the content of the art – the content of struggle. He was interested in prints that reflected reality.
When I finally got enough money to leave NYC and buy a run-down shell of a shack in the country, Steve was keen to come too. He was a hundred percent certain it was the right move, even though neither of us had ever lived in rural America – being around wild animals, beyond rats and pigeons, seeing the Milky Way. Steve loved it, and he built his own proper printing studio exactly how he wanted it. Not a tiny, dark rental apartment in a five-story walk-up – his own place, with windows. He drew birds and mountains. He printed while listening to Bach. He liked the staff at the Galerie St. Etienne – decent people, straightforward and honest.
He was a loner by nature.
I talk to Steve all the time, same as ever – politics and art. I never made a single print in my own life until Steve died. Now I find myself asking him: which roller should I use? He had about fifty. Which paper? Which ink? He kept stashes of paper that only he could tell apart. He'd be pleased to know I can print a woodblock well now – up to his standards.
For a while after he died, I thought about not carving another block at all. Half the fun had always been handing him the block and watching him study it, with that serious printer's face, deciding how to run it – then the magic of watching the print come alive for the first time.
But the day I made my first print on my own – a praying mantis – was the first day I'd felt happy since Steve died, six months before.
It's keeping him going, in a strange way.
Steve donated so many prints to animal rights causes over the years.
He was a good person.
-Sue Coe
Coe's early prints are stamped with a "Sue Coe/Steve Murray" chop mark. In later years, Steve developed his own chop, a bird in flight, along with his last name, "Murray."
Unless otherwise noted, all prints dated before 2026
were published by the artist in conjunction with Steve Murray. -
