From the outset of her career, the content of Coe’s work has revolved around injustice, but for close to twenty years her primary subject has been animals. In a world beset by rampant cruelty to humans, Coe’s focus on animals frequently surprises even sympathetic observers. Coe claims she chose animals because she wanted to give these mute victims a voice, but that explanation seems at best incomplete. Precisely because it is so rampant and geographically dispersed, human suffering can appear virtually ungraspable. Although Coe’s examination of apartheid in her South Africa series was masterful, the images lacked the visceral realism of observed experience. On the other hand, Coe did not want to become mired in the specificity of human genocide, migrating randomly from Bosnia to Rwanda to Darfur. Her chief concern was what she saw as the central calamity of modern existence: global capitalism and its treatment of living beings as expendable commodities. This thesis, she felt, was clearly expressed in the widespread abuse of farm and research animals, and in the environmental degradation, food contamination and worker exploitation abetted by the meat industry. Furthermore, this concealed industry exists right in our midst. The interaction between industry and animals could be directly observed by the artist, and it affects everyone on the planet. For Sue Coe, animals became the single subject that encompassed all subjects.

Sheep of Fools (a pun on Sebastian Brant’s fifteenth-century catalogue of human vices, Ship of Fools) is Coe’s third cohesive body of work devoted to animal subject matter. Her first and to date most extensive such series was Porkopolis, encompassing a ten-year investigation of factory farms and slaughterhouses. Beginning with pigs but eventually expanding to include cows, goats, sheep and poultry, this series was published in 1996 under the title Dead Meat. Coe’s adoption of an abandoned pit bull helped inspire her next book, Pit’s Letter (2000), a novella about vivisection that traced various connections between human and animal abuse. Sheep of Fools is a direct outgrowth of Coe’s two preceding series. Comprising a number of short pictorial cycles that include Ghost Sheep, Weapons of Mass Destruction, Fowl Plague, The Man with No Heart and Run!, Coe’s latest drawings combine the sort of direct observation perfected in Porkopolis with constructed narratives reminiscent of Pit’s Letter. As a group, the disparate Sheep vignettes have a cumulative effect, but unlike the Pit drawings, they reach no overarching conclusion. While Sheep of Fools deals with profoundly disturbing events, the artist maintains a relatively light editorial touch, allowing the subjects to speak for themselves.

Although Sheep of Fools exists on a continuum with Coe’s prior animal work, it also reflects changes in her professional orientation. Shortly after publishing Pit’s Letter, the artist left Manhattan to move permanently to upstate New York, where she had for some years maintained a summer cabin. The resultant reduction in living expenses made it possible for her to give up editorial illustration and devote herself full-time to independent artwork. Moving to the country also immersed Coe in aspects of nature and farming that she previously had experienced only as a visitor. In 2002, she began an extremely congenial relationship with the alternative magazine Blab!, which unlike more mainstream publications, places no restrictions of form or content on her work. Working with Blab! and the writer Judith Brody, she has been able to conduct preliminary explorations of subjects, such as those now subsumed within the Sheep of Fools series, to see if they merit deeper investigation. Testing her work before an audience, through publication as well as by giving regular public lectures, is the principal way that Coe hones her message and grows as an artist and as a human being.

Sheep of Fools originated with a brief news clipping about the sinking of a shipful of sheep bound from Australia to Jordan. Coe was struck by the fact that the clipping listed only one (human) casualty and made scant mention of the fact that over 60,000 sheep had also lost their lives. Coe’s attempt to visualize that tragedy resulted in the cycle Ghost Sheep, published in Blab! in 2002. However, the artist remained fascinated with the stories behind the story. The live transport of sheep (and also cattle) from agricultural centers like Australia to the Middle East has become a huge business in the last thirty years, because Islam requires that animals be slaughtered locally according to religious ritual. Yet the animal mortality rate on such transports hovers around 10%, and often the sheep arrive in such miserable shape that the ports refuse to accept them. Coe was curious, too, about what the ships brought back after unloading their animal cargo. (Contraband? No one would say.) She noted that the wool industry, centuries ago, contributed to England’s rise as a world power, and that the use of underpaid immigrant labor aboard ship and in Middle-Eastern slaughterhouses is today part of a widespread effort to shift work away from unionized industrial countries. Whereas the pigs of Porkopolis were farmed and slaughtered locally, sheep, in Coe’s view, are global animals, intimately connected to international trends in commerce and labor. Gradually, Ghost Sheep morphed into the book-length Sheep of Fools.

Dead Meat took ten years to find its way into print, but Sheep of Fools is being published only three years after Coe began researching the subject. As a result, she sees this publication as the beginning, rather than the end of a new project. Even as she prepared her book, related subjects inevitably caught her attention. Fowl Plague focuses on avian influenza, which is emblematic of the way industrialized farming in a global environment exacerbates the linkage between animal and human disease. A story in the local paper about a farmer who starved his livestock through neglect inspired the cycle The Man with No Heart. Similarly, Run! reflects the artist’s encounters with local deer hunters. Life in the country has also engendered a deeper attraction to natural materials. Coe has begun making woodcuts, savoring the grain and texture of the wood. Using paper handmade by the artist Eric Avery from the wool of rescued sheep, she has done monoprints based on her sheep sketches. And of course Coe did not to fail to respond to the war in Iraq. Bully, published shortly before the 2004 election, was a send-up of what the artist sees as the Bush administration’s worst failings. Abu Ghraib inspired several searing woodcuts, while Coe’s Weapons of Mass Destruction series manages to locate the “missing” WMDS: in the AIDS pandemic, the armaments industry and the death penalty.