Susanna Coffey


Susanna J. Coffey is an American artist. She is the F. H. Sellers Professor in Painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and currently lives and works in New York City. She was elected into the National Academy of Design in 1999.

Life

She was born in New London, Connecticut.
She received a Bachelor of Fine Art degree Magna Cum Laude from the University of Connecticut in 1977 and a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Yale School of Art in 1982. Her work investigates normative values of beauty and gender asking questions like "What is a beautiful appearance? Why do conventionally gendered images involve caricature? Can inchoate feeling-states be adequately portrayed?"
Coffey is best known for her paintings of heads―often self-portraits, such as her Self Portrait, Versace Scarf in the collection of the Honolulu Museum of Art. Like many of her paintings, this 1996 self-portrait is a frontal view, lit from behind. Hearne Pardee describes her practice in the Brooklyn Rail:

Collections

Among the public collections holding work by Susanna Coffey are: The Akron Art Museum in Akron, Ohio, Yale University Art Gallery, the Danforth Art Museum in Framingham MA, the Art Institute of Chicago in Chicago, the Brauer Museum of Art in Valparaiso, Indiana, the Davis Museum and Cultural Center at Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, the Honolulu Museum of Art in Honolulu, Hawaii, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the National Academy of Design in New York City, the Rockford Museum in Rockford, Illinois, the Weatherspoon Art Gallery in Greensboro, North Carolina and the Williams College Museum of Art in Williamstown, Massachusetts.

Awards

Susanna Coffey has received awards from: National Endowment for the Arts, Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, Residency at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, The Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation Studio Program Award.