Commitment to the Struggle: The Art of Sue Coe includes drawings and prints on such varied topics as the Ku Klux Klan, apartheid, Malcolm X, and skinheads; AIDS; labor and sweatshop conditions; war and the economic interests of the petrochemical industry; and vivisection, animal rights, and the American meat industry.

Born in Britain, Sue Coe moved to the US in 1972 and immediately began work as an illustrator for the op-ed page of the New York Times. Her drawings have since been included in The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, National Lampoon, and Artforum, among other publications.

Coe has an unerring instinct for anticipating significant issues. Her book How to Commit Suicide in South Africa (1983)—about the death of Stephen Biko and other student organizers in South African prisons—became an anti-apartheid organizing tool used on college campuses to persuade investors to divest themselves of South African stock. Similarly, her 1986 book X (The Life and Times of Malcolm X) prefigured the resurgence of popular interest in the black leader.

Since 1986, Coe has devoted her energies, more and more exclusively, to the defense of animals in industry, from factory farming to medical research and genetic engineering. Her dedication to animal rights began early; she grew up in a house adjacent to a slaughterhouse, with all of its associated sights and smells. From 1986 to 1992, Coe visited slaughterhouses in the United States, Canada, and England. Through associates who worked in the meat industry, she gained access to stockyard operations in Arizona, California, Missouri, Minnesota, Texas, and Montreal; a meatpacking plant in Los Angeles; a free-range cattle ranch in Utah; dairies in New Mexico; egg factories in North Carolina and Pennsylvania; and Kosher and Muslim slaughterhouses in New Jersey. Although cameras and videos were forbidden, Coe's sketchbook was usually considered harmless. When she was not allowed to sketch she made notes.

Her research resulted in a series she calls Porkopolis, after the slang term for Cincinnati, the first centralized meat-processing center in the US. Published in 1996 under the title Dead Meat, the series provides a detailed look at the American meat industry. Many of the images are gruesome and difficult to look at, depicting as they do practices employed in factory farms and slaughterhouses, practices that in many cases are unthinkable and well hidden in modern society. Other images—such as Modern Man Followed by the Ghosts of his Meat and Scientists Find a Cure for Empathy—use satire, sarcasm, or humor to inform.

The victimization of animals in Porkopolis is related to other issues, other situations of social and political oppression. The meat industry exploits its workers and pollutes the environment; its abuse of animals is a variation on the theme of the exploitation of the weak by the strong. In the words of Theodor Adorno, "Auschwitz begins whenever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they're only animals."

The Art of Sue Coe was organized by the David Winton Bell Gallery with assistance from Galerie St. Etienne, New York.