Cruel - Sue Coe

Cruel. Bearing witness to animal exploitation is a series of art and text about the meat industrial complex. It takes a long and hard look at factory farming and its horrific toll on billions of animals. Richly illustrated with full-color paintings and drawings throughout, Cruel conveys the terrible beauty, and intense suffering, of both the animals so sacrificed and the workers involved in their violent destruction. While unexpectedly beautiful in its depiction of the brutal consequences of meat eating, this is a deeply moving, upsetting work, not for the faint of heart. Armed only with her sketchpad, Coe is often allowed access to places no photographer or reporter is admitted: the result is a passionate testimony to the waste and violence perpetrated by one species against so many others

Aside from factory farming, in Cruel Coe also sets her sights on lesser-known, yet equally shocking, methods involved in commercial fishing, the wool industry, the flagrant use of pesticides, and livestock "protection" collars. This is social and political art at its most powerful, in the tradition of Goya, Käthe Kollwitz, and Diego Rivera.

Cruel includes notes supplementing Coe's own texts and illustrations by Judy Brody, with whom she has previously collaborated. Brody runs the website Graphic Witness: "social commentary through graphic imagery."

Huffington Post about the book

About the author

Sue Coe was born in Liverpool and grew up next to a slaughterhouse. She studied at the Royal College of Art in London and left for New York in 1972. She was featured in the magazine "Raw" and contributed illustrations to "New YOrk Times", " The New Yorker", "The Nation", "The Village Voice", Rolling Stone" among lots of other publications. Her Paintings have been exhibited in galleries and museums around the world, including New York's Museum of Modern Art.

Details:
Pages: 192
Edition: 1st edition 2012
Publisher: OR Books