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Published on November 02, 2021
Strike. 1980. Mixed media on heavy white board. 27 5/8" x 20 5/8". Poster design for the Hospital and Health Care Workers Union, courtesy of the artist and Galerie St. Etienne.
Paul, 1994, gouache, charcoal and collage on white Strathmore Bristol board, text, 40 x 30 in, from the “AIDS” series image courtesy of the artist and Galerie St. Etienne.
Police State, 1986, oil on gessoed paper, initialed and inscribed, “I Saw This on Nov. 2 1985, “ Reproduced in X (The Life and Times of Malcolm X), p.29 and on the cover of Police State catalog by Donald Kuspit.
One of the Cruelest Beasts Ever Known, 1985. Graphite and gouache on white Strathmore Bristol board. Signed and dated, lower left. Inscribed "One of the Cruelest Beasts Ever Known One Million Dollars Spent Every Minute on Nuclear Weapons," lower right. 52 1/4" x 30 7/8".
Coe is a graphic artist and visual essayist. Though she primarily works in printmaking and illustration, she also practices in other visual media, including painting. Coe's paintings and prints are auctioned as fundraisers for a variety of progressive causes. Since 1998, she has sold prints to benefit animal rights organizations. Her influences include the works of Chaïm Soutine and José Guadalupe Posada, Käthe Kollwitz, Francisco Goya, and Rembrandt.
Coe uses books and visual essays to explore various social topics including: factory farming, meat packing, apartheid, sweatshops, prison-industrial complex, AIDS, and war. Coe cites activists as the primary audience for her work. As an illustrator, she is a frequent contributor to World War 3 Illustrated, and has seen her work published in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Time Magazine, Newsweek The Nation, and other periodicals. One of her illustrations was used on the cover of the book, Animals, Property, and the Law (1995) by Gary Francione, and her artwork is also featured in the animal rights movie, Earthlings.
An activist whose art is a blend of visual journalism, social protest, and propaganda, Sue Coe is a widely acclaimed painter, illustrator, printmaker, and comic book artist whose expressive, political works engage with issues such as animal rights, social injustice, war, anticapitalism, and racial inequality. Her woodcuts and linocuts, such as Birth of Fascism (2017) and Fueling Extinction (2020) are deliberately blunt, and recall the coarsely illustrated broadsides of J.G. Posada. Filled with violent imagery and a scathing anger at the state of the world, Coe’s painted works, such as Move Bombing and Monetarism (both 1987), form part of more complex visual narratives told over several pages. Coe contributed to Art Spiegelman’s iconic Raw magazine.