Visitors to the Grumpy Vegan are invited to join me and Sue Coe at the opening of her show, “Elephants We Must Never Forget: New Paintings Drawings and Prints,” at the Galerie St. Etienne in Manhattan on the evening of Tuesday, October 14. If you’re unable to join us and you will be in New York City between October 14 and December 20, please visit the gallery to see an art show about elephants in entertainment that will inspire and inform. Sue and I are collaborating on the biography of Topsy, the elephant electrocuted by Edison in 1903. An early version of this important story of an iconic animal was published as “An Elephant Never Forgets” in Blab! No. 18.
As Gallery Director Jane Kallir describes Sue Coe,
As an artist, she had never been content merely to deliver a didactic political message; her goal was share with others her personal emotional reactions. Increasingly, she came to recognize that this was an open-ended process, the success of which depended less on what was said overtly than on what was left unsaid. Mystery and ambiguity lie at the heart of all great art. It is not, in the end, what we know about the elephants that gives Coe’s latest paintings their haunting power, but what we can never know about these grand but alien creatures. Nonetheless, the paintings reflect Coe’s belief that we humans have a community of interest with the elephants and that we and they share a common fate. Indeed, our very survival as a species may depend on recognizing our interconnectedness with all living beings, and abandoning our attempts to coerce nature into compliance with our whims.
Intrigued to learn more about Sue Coe and her work? Check out Graphic Witness!
