Sue Coe, Police State, 1986. Oil on gessoed paper, 53 x 31 inches. © Sue Coe, Courtesy Galerie St. Etienne, New York.
Emily R. Pellerin recently wrote a perceptive piece about our exhibition ‘Political Television,’ currently on view at the gallery.
"It is said that the youth are the ones with fire burning inside them," she writes. "They are the ones inflamed and enraged at the establishment, with the energy to get out there and stoke change before they extinguish to paths of lesser resistance, surrender to a more 'sociable' internal mechanics. And yet there is Sue Coe, in her 70s now, a counterpoint to the above, an activist-artist with the fire of youthful dissent still charged and aflame. She makes art and screams at the world at the top of her lungs through it. Her media is not palatable, it is not friendly. It is loose-lipped and finger-pointing, shameless and incendiary."
Pellerin devotes part of her piece to the most recent works on view: Coe's ongoing series of prints.
"Coe’s large and mostly multimedia works, altogether raging, are only part of her exhibition at George Adams; in a secondary show-within-the-show, The Age of Authoritarianism is a series of 67 linocut prints (all produced in editions) that have been made between 2016 and 2022, spurred on by the beginning of the Trump tyranny."
Given Coe's unabashed depictions of events in the past as well as current events affecting us all, the words "incendiary" and "raging" are most apt.