In HACC's Rose Lehrman Art Gallery: 'Unnatural Disorder,' prints by Sue Coe

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Artist makes campus visit on March 24

Feb. 10, 2011

HARRISBURG – “Unnatural Disorder” features images by Sue Coe, internationally known animal and human rights activist, on display March 14-April 7 at the Rose Lehrman Art Gallery on the Harrisburg Campus of HACC, Central Pennsylvania’s Community College.

Students, art and sociology faculty will host a campus visit by the artist Thursday, March 24. Coe will give a free lecture on her art at 5:30 p.m. in the Rose Lehrman Arts Center theatre, followed by a reception and print sale.

The exhibition is now in the HACC permanent art collection.

Prints in the collection are largely woodcuts and etchings, both print mediums chosen by Coe in part because of their accessibility to everyone. The plight of animals are depicted in such works as “She Packed Her Trunk and Said Goodbye to the Circus” and “Lost Whale Swims Up the Thames” and earlier works such as “Modern Man Followed by the Ghosts of His Meat.” Not all the works in the exhibit are about animals. “Helping Hands” was created in response to the devastating 2010 earthquake in Haiti. “Unnatural Disorder” depicts Earth’s pecking order.

According to Galerie St. Etienne in Manhattan, N.Y., Coe’s home gallery: “Many years ago, Sue Coe, who in the 1980s had earned a reputation as one of the foremost political artists of her generation by focusing on racial, class and gender inequities, came to the conclusion that humankind's relationship to the natural environment was the most compelling social issue of our time. Although she recognized the pitfalls of equating animals with the human victims of oppression, Coe nonetheless felt that animals constituted a key link, both symbolic and concrete, to the increasingly compromised realm of nature.”

Coe, a native of Tamworth, England, grew up near a slaughterhouse which influenced her as an activist and an artist. She began her career as an illustrator for Time magazine, the New York Times and other publications, after studying at the Royal College of Art in London.

She is the author of several books, including “How to Commit Suicide in South Africa” (1983); “Paintings and Drawings by Sue Coe” (1985); “X (The Life and Times of Malcolm X” (1986); “Dead Meat,”Winner of the 1991 Genesis Award (1996); “Pit’s Letter” (2000); “Bully: Master of the Global Merry-Go-Round” (2004); and “Sheep of Fools” (2005).

Coe has shown widely in the United States and has appeared on the cover of Art News. Her work is in many major collections, including Brooklyn Museum of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum, all in New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and Hirshorn Museum at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C.

Gallery hours are 11 a.m.-3 p.m. Monday-Friday, 5-7 p.m. Tuesday and Thursday, or by appointment. For more information, call 780-2435 or e-mail Kim Banister, gallery curator, at kebanist@hacc.edu. Visit the gallery on the HACC website: www.hacc.edu under the Rose Lehrman Arts Center and on Facebook.

Sue Coe prints in the exhibit are a gift to the college by the HACC Student Government Association. Programming is supported by the Student Government Association and the Sociology Department. The Rose Lehrman Art Gallery receives state arts funding support through a grant from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, a state agency funded by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency.

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