Professor Susanna Coffey in Group Show at High Museum

Professor Susanna Coffey’s work is featured in the group show What is Left Unspoken, Love at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta Georgia. This show will remain on view until August 14, 2022. 

The show develops the following questions, according to the press release: “Is love intrinsic, or is it a habit? What is the difference between love and friendship? What is the relationship of love to truth, freedom, and justice?” All works are contemporary, made between 1987 and 2022, and explore the ways in which love is expressed.  

Curated and planned during a time of political unrest when “cynicism often seems to triumph over hope, this exhibition will examine love as a profound subject of critical commentary from time immemorial yet with a persistently elusive definition.” The show features more than seventy works of all mediums by more than thirty-five international artists based in North America, Europe, and Asia. 

Coffey’s work in particular includes eight self-portrait paintings. According to Coffey, these works were “part of a thirty year ongoing project.” The portraits center around love and appearance and the way the media limits the great scope of these realities. Coffey wrote, “most films, media, and art history reveal a narrow range of stereotypes, and I saw these as masking who we really are as people…I paint enthusiastically against false, repressive standards of beauty and celebrate the way that each of us is capable of displaying a wide and multivalent identity. All of art history’s formal greatness challenges me and I, in the most modest sense, challenge a good deal of painting’s figurative representations.”

Coffey’s work is included in the collections of The Art institute of Chicago, The National Portrait Gallery, National Academy of Design, The Hood Museum, The Honolulu Museum of Art, Minneapolis Museum of Art, The Weatherspoon Art Museum, the Yale University Art Gallery, and others. Awards include the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, the National Endowment for the Arts Award, and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award. Her many one-person exhibitions have been written about in The New York Times, Art in America, Art News, The New Yorker, Hyperallergic, and other publications. Several books and monographs have included, or featured, her work. She received honorary degrees from the Pennsylvania College of the Arts and the Lyme Academy of Art.