Sue Coe: The Ghosts of Our Meat

The Ghosts of Our Meat examines a series of paintings, prints and drawings by artist/activist Sue Coe that criticize the practice of meat consumption and the capitalist slaughterhouse industry, while advocating animal rights and a sustainable, non-meat diet. Coe's work centers on such issues as animal rights, empathy, cruelty, corporate greed and consumer guilt. Discussing her works in an accompanying essay, Stephen Eisenman demonstrates connections between Coe's work and that of Romantics and Expressionists, inviting comparisons with paintings by artists such as Hogarth, Goya, Grosz, Dix, Shahn, Picasso and Golub. However, while these artists focused largely on man's inhumanity towards fellow man, Sue Coe broadens the perspective to include atrocities committed by man against fellow animals. Indeed, many of Coe's works reference the style and imagery of Weimar-era art, drawing uncomfortable and controversial comparisons between the slaughterhouses of the meat industry and those of the Holocaust.