[4][5] Examples include the oeuvre of painter Louis Remy Mignot[6] and a large sculpture entitled “Saul Under the Influence of the Evil Spirit” by William Wetmore Story that had disappeared for 150 years.
(He told reporter Deena ElGenaidi that "Our American galleries have cried out for a monumental marble of a dramatic subject, and you cannot get more monumental or dramatic than King Saul of the Bible.”[4] Coffey's expertise in Judaica and Israeli art derived from the NCMA's role as a repository of material gifted to the Museum by some of North Carolina's smaller Jewish communities when they could no long sustain their synagogues and wished to preserve their ritual silverware for posterity.
[8] In other roles, Coffey has been the NCMA's liaison with the Friends of the Judaic Art Gallery as well as the statewide director of the Israel/North Carolina Cultural Exchange between 1994-97.
"[5] Other exhibitions he has organized include "Making Faces: Self-Portraits by Alex Katz" (1990) and "Color, Myth, and Music: Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Synchromism" (2001).
Coffey worked with Hal Weeks of the Shoals Marine Laboratory to identify precise locations for each painting, mirroring the artist's own exactitude.
His assessment of the Confederate memorials as art was negative, a point cited in 2017 during local and national debates about Civil War statues resulting in the controversial removal of many of them, including in Durham, North Carolina.