About Sue Coe

Through printmaking, Sue Coe found a way to serve a broad audience, disseminating her messages through affordably-priced prints accessible to people of all financial means. Numerous books and visual essays published over the years have served a similar purpose; over the past two decades, book projects have included Bully: Master of the Global Merry-Go-Round (2004), a scathing critique of the Bush administration, as well as the book Sheep of Fools: A Song Cycle for Five Voices (2005), which gives a broad history of sheep farming, highlighting the abuses of the animals for human gain. “MAD AS HELL!,” Coe’s 2012 exhibition at the Galerie St. Etienne, concomitantly published by O/R Books in book form as Cruel, is a continued, critical look at the animal industry, built upon her groundbreaking Dead Meat (1996). The Animals’ Vegan Manifesto, published in 2016, features 100 original woodcuts and linocuts advocating for animal abolition; 2018’s Zooicide: Seeing Cruelty, Demanding Abolition, uses original drawings and linocuts to show why the solution is not to reform zoos, but to abolish them. Other publications include How to Commit Suicide in South Africa (1983), X (1986), Police State (1987), Pit’s Letter (2000), and The Ghosts of our Meat (2013).

In 2013, Coe was awarded the prestigious Dickinson College Arts Award in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. She also received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Women’s Caucus for Art in 2015, and more recently, was awarded the 2017 Lifetime Achievement in Printmaking Award by The Southern Graphics Council in Atlanta, Georgia. Her 2018 solo exhibition at MoMA PS1, “Sue Coe: Graphic Resistance,” received rave reviews. Since 2016, the artist has focused on documenting the misdeeds of the Trump administration and, more recently, its failure to adequately address COVID-19.