Baker Artist Portfolios

Suzanne Coley is a 2023-2024 Folger Institute Fellow and a 2023-2024 Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies Fellow. Her main artistic fields are printmaking, poetry, embroidery, and book arts. Suzanne Coley is the artist credited with pioneering the style of "couture textile books," which combines precise design with bold experimentation by incorporating couture sewing techniques into bookmaking, often using unique fabrics and embroidery to create layered, artistic volumes. Suzanne has created over 500 unique books since 2015. Suzanne's fine art textile books are in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian Institution (National Museum of African Art Library), The Folger Shakespeare Library, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, and private collections.

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 former historian of the African American Quilters of Baltimore, Suzanne has created a two volume book documenting African American quilting styles, aesthetic sensibilities, needle techniques and histories.