Baker Artist Portfolios

Suzanne Coley is a 2023-2024 Folger Shakespeare Library Fellow and a 2023-2024 Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies Fellow.  Her main artistic fields are printmaking, poetry, and book arts.  She has pioneered the style of book making called  "couture textile books," combining precision and intentionality of design with bold experimentation and abstraction.  Over the past fifteen years, Suzanne has merged couture sewing techniques with embroidery and poetry in her art.  Suzanne's fine art textile books are in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Institution (National Museum of African Art Library), The Folger Shakespeare Library, and the National Museum of Women in the Arts.  

Her project Love Sonnets from Shakespeare to Baltimore, a series of couture textile books that include quilting, Shakepeare's sonnets, printmaking, and bookbinding, was supported with a Rubys 2020 grant by the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation.   The historian of the African American Quilters of Baltimore, Suzanne created a two volume book documenting the members' quilting styles, aesthetic sensibilities, needle techniques and histories.