“In my own creative life, I prefer to come at things sideways, and yet it’s because of that approach that I find myself admiring people like LaToya Ruby Frazier. Frazier, 39, is a photographer, but really, her practice is as much about her medium as it is continuing in the tradition of her philosophical forebears — visual artists such as Rick Lowe, Joseph Beuys, Dorothea Lange, Faith Ringgold and Sue Coe; writers such as Larry Kramer, Upton Sinclair and Arundhati Roy — people who smudged the line between activism and art.”

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Inciter by Sue Coe.

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Trump promotes division.

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Dickinson will honor Sue Coe, an internationally acclaimed artist and activist whose paintings and prints explore animal rights, social injustice, capitalism and politics, with the college’s 2013 Arts Award on Nov. 1. The Arts Award presentation and a new Trout Gallery exhibition will cap off a multiday residency at the college during which Coe will share her work and ideas with the college community.

Coe, a U.K. native, attended London’s Royal College of Art before moving to New York in 1972. Her art has been published in The New York Times, The New Yorker and Rolling Stone, among many other prominent publications. She is the author of numerous books, including the award-winning Dead Meat, which documents Coe’s visits to farms, slaughterhouses and meatpacking companies throughout the U.S.

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“I want my art to represent the ‘under dog’ and pig and cow and chicken, the fishes, the food animals, the most oppressed beings on earth. The history of art is filled with images of animals and women as property, the Lord of the Manor in the foreground, and the mansion, servants, animals in the misty backdrop, populating his world.”

Read more about it in the October/November issue of Red Pepper magazine

I make vegans,” says Sue Coe, the British American artist widely known since the 1980s for her sociopolitical drawings and prints. She recently published her third book on the meat industry, Cruel: Bearing Witness to Animal Exploitation (OR Books), filled with haunting and empathic illustrations of gaunt, terrified animals being herded to their factory-line deaths and dismembered by downtrodden workers. (Some of these pictures appeared in her show at New York’s Galerie St. Etienne last spring.)

Coe’s images are informed by the history of British caricature as well as by political art from the 1930s and ’40s, particularly that of Käthe Kollwitz. Some are straightforward reportage sketched directly from life in slaughterhouses and on farms. Others are more overt propaganda, such as the drawing of a fat-cat industrialist holding bloody moneybags atop a heap of animal carcasses.

Read the full article in ARTnews

Sue Coe is best known for her paintings and drawings of animals in slaughterhouses and factory farms, but her work examines social justice issues ranging from union struggles to the civil rights movement, from prison abolition to rape. Coe’s images have the urgency of someone trying to save a life, and in a way that is what she is doing—drawing attention to the death and exploitation that happens daily all around us in an attempt to awaken our compassion and move us to action. Coe’s newest work, Cruel, is a harrowing and heart-wrenching examination of animal cruelty in the meat industry. Coe takes us into the slaughterhouse with her. Armed with her pencil and sketchpad, she allows us to be present with these animals, who are usually viewed as nothing more than a future meal, in the last moments of their lives. Coe’s images often take on the dark humor of political cartoons and her graphic imagery sits burned into one’s brain—as any successful piece of propaganda should.

I met Coe at Moo Shoes, a vegan shoe store on Orchard Street in Manhattan. It was an unusual place to do an interview, but as Coe had just celebrated the book release party for Cruel there a few weeks prior, it seemed fitting. It turned out to be a welcoming and quiet place to talk.

Coe’s passion for heart-breaking subjects doesn’t stop her from being a delightful, kind and funny woman to talk to. When I met Coe she was wearing a flowing black dress that matched her long black hair. Her attire was accompanied by bright red lipstick, which, along with her gentle accent and sweet tone, gave her the distinct look of some radical anarchist Hogwarts professor who had been edited out of the Harry Potter books.

Read the full article in BOMB magazine

For several decades, Sue Coe has been drawing and painting the brutality of the meat industry. She snuck into slaughterhouses and, because she carried only a pad and pencil, not cameras, has been allowed access to chicken and other livestock factories and production facilities.

Brief essays accompany the shocking, sorrowful images. Many of the drawings have a Third Reich feel, black and bloody; tortured animals and human workers mutated by their own cauterized feelings. Coe writes of mother cows and pigs separated from their young; of the yearning of animals for family members. She refuses the truism that animals and fish have no feelings, that sheep feel nothing when they are sheared. Her environments, her backdrops are poisoned, toxic, apocalyptic. She writes with certainty that our cruelty will come back to haunt us.

Read the full article in the Los Angeles Review of Books

Cruel is a series of art and text about the meat industrial complex, the hidden lives of the victims of it.

From birth to death, animals live in a way of inconceivable suffering. They are bludgeoned, cut, hooked, their tails are docked, they are de-horned, their ears are punched, their testicles are gauged out, their beaks cut off, they’re branded, their babies are torn away, they are gassed, electrocuted, their throats are cut. Bred only to be slaughtered, their lives are concealed from us. Historically, small family farmsteads struggled but couldn’t compete with vertically integrated corporate-owned agribusinesses. Farmed animals moved out of the sunshine and off the grass, into confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs), becoming units of production in the process. Biology and pharmaceuticals developed ways to keep the hapless “units” alive and growing rapidly, producing more meat, milk and eggs under ever harsher conditions: turkeys and chickens grew faster than ever but on less feed, meaning more profit. There was selection for those better able to withstand the greater stresses of confinement and mutilation.

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When it was published in 1996, Dead Meat, Sue Coe’s graphic exposé of the meat-processing industry, was as shocking as Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle 90 years earlier. Both captured the horror of the slaughterhouse while critiquing the underlying barbarity of capitalism. This month, OR Books is publishing an update called Cruel: Bearing Witness to Animal Exploitation ($25), which draws on Coe’s “life” in slaughterhouses and stockyards, tackling subjects that she didn’t feel qualified to deal with earlier—such as the infectious diseases that are now systemic in industrialized food and can spread globally in a matter of days. I asked Coe to discuss the artistic, aesthetic, and moral implications of a subject that has occupied more than 20 years of her life.

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