CAMeNews :: Fall 2006 :: UCDHSC College of Arts & Media

Emmanuel Gallery, the University of Colorado at Denver and Health Sciences Center’s CU-Denver Live!, and the Alliance for Contemporary Art of the Denver Art Museum present visual artist/visual activist Sue Coe in the exhibition Selections from Sheep of Fools, Thursday, August 3, 2006 through Saturday, September 9, 2006 at the Emmanuel Gallery, located on the downtown Denver Auraria campus. A closing reception for the showing of mixed media drawings will be held on Wednesday, September 6, 2006 from 5:00 pm to 6:30 pm, followed by an artist lecture from 7:00 pm to 8:30 pm at the King Center on Auraria Campus. The showing, reception, and lecture are all free and open to the public.

This one-woman exhibition features a selection from Coe’s Sheep of Fools, a series that focuses on the artist’s interest in the relationship between humans and animals. Whereas her highly acclaimed Porkopolis series in the 1980s investigated slaughterhouses and factory farms with on-site visits, this newer work melds factual information with allegorical symbolism. All of Coe’s work displays loose narrative structures that are intended to educate as well as inspire reform. Meticulous in their detail and often apocalyptic in tone, Coe’s latest drawings are reminiscent of Bosch or Breughel. Like Coe’s previous series, Sheep of Fools exposes the exploitation of the weak by the strong, a phenomenon that victimizes humans and animals alike.

Coe rose to prominence in the early 1980s. Her work has a raw edge that is unmistakable; she has long been acknowledged as one of the foremost social commentators of our time. Coe has shown internationally for her art, yet publications have always been her preferred means of communication. Upon arriving in the United States from her native England in 1972, she went to work for The New York Times, where she has worked in print media ever since. Her work is also continually featured in Blab!, an art-focused publication the Los Angeles Reader calls “a New Yorker for mutants.”

The exhibition, Sue Coe Selections from ‘Sheep of Fools’, was organized in cooperation with the Galerie St. Etienne in New York. For more information on the exhibit, the reception, or the lecture, please call Emmanuel Gallery at 303.556.8337, or CU-Denver Live! at 303.352.3500. Information can also be obtained at www.cudenver.edu/cam/events.