Petah Coyne (born 1953) is a contemporary American sculptor and photographer best known for her large and small scale hanging sculptures and floor installations. Working in innovative and disparate materials, her media has ranged from the organic to the ephemeral, from incorporating dead fish, mud, sticks, hay, hair, black sand, specially-formulated and patented wax, satin ribbons, silk flowers, to more recently, velvet, taxidermy, and cast wax statuary. Coyne's sculptures and photographs have been the subject of more than 30 solo museum exhibitions. Her work is in numerous permanent museum collections, including the

Museum of Modern Art The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It plays a major role in developing and collecting modern art, and is often identified as one of ...

, the

Metropolitan Museum of Art The Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York City, colloquially "the Met", is the largest art museum in the Americas. Its permanent collection contains over two million works, divided among 17 curatorial departments. The main building at 1000 ...

, the

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, often referred to as The Guggenheim, is an art museum at 1071 Fifth Avenue on the corner of East 89th Street on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City. It is the permanent home of a continuously exp ...

, the

Whitney Museum of American Art The Whitney Museum of American Art, known informally as "The Whitney", is an art museum in the Meatpacking District and West Village neighborhoods of Manhattan in New York City. It was founded in 1930 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1875–1942), ...

, the

Brooklyn Museum of Art The Brooklyn Museum is an art museum located in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. At , the museum is New York City's second largest and contains an art collection with around 1.5 million objects. Located near the Prospect Heights, Crown H ...

, the

Denver Art Museum The Denver Art Museum (DAM) is an art museum located in the Civic Center of Denver, Colorado. With encyclopedic collections of more than 70,000 diverse works from across the centuries and world, the DAM is one of the largest art museums between t ...

, the

Philadelphia Museum of Art The Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMoA) is an art museum originally chartered in 1876 for the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. The main museum building was completed in 1928 on Fairmount, a hill located at the northwest end of the Benjamin Fr ...

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San Francisco Museum of Modern Art The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) is a modern and contemporary art museum located in San Francisco, California. A nonprofit organization, SFMOMA holds an internationally recognized collection of modern and contemporary art, and was ...

, the

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden is an art museum beside the National Mall, in Washington, D.C., the United States. The museum was initially endowed during the 1960s with the permanent art collection of Joseph H. Hirshhorn. It was des ...

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Smithsonian Institution The Smithsonian Institution ( ), or simply the Smithsonian, is a group of museums and education and research centers, the largest such complex in the world, created by the U.S. government "for the increase and diffusion of knowledge". Founded ...

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Museum of Fine Arts, Boston The Museum of Fine Arts (often abbreviated as MFA Boston or MFA) is an art museum in Boston, Massachusetts. It is the 20th-largest art museum in the world, measured by public gallery area. It contains 8,161 paintings and more than 450,000 works ...

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Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art opened in 1994 in Kansas City, Missouri. With a $5 million annual budget and approximately 75,000 visitors each year, it is Missouri's first and largest contemporary museum. Founders The core of the museum's perm ...

Kiasma ) , established = (Museum of Contemporary Art) (opening of Kiasma building) , dissolved = , location = Helsinki, Finland , type = Art museum , accreditation = , key_holdings = , co ...

in Finland, the

Montreal Museum of Fine Arts The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA; french: Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, MBAM) is an art museum in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. It is the largest art museum in Canada by gallery space. The museum is located on the historic Golden Square ...

Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal The Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal (MACM) is a contemporary art museum in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. It is located on the Place des festivals in the Quartier des spectacles and is part of the Place des Arts complex. Founded in 1964, it is ...

, the

Toledo Museum of Art The Toledo Museum of Art is an internationally known art museum located in the Old West End neighborhood of Toledo, Ohio. It houses a collection of more than 30,000 objects. With 45 galleries, it covers 280,000 square feet and is currently in th ...

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High Museum of Art The High Museum of Art (colloquially the High) is the largest museum for visual art in the Southeastern United States. Located in Atlanta, Georgia (on Peachtree Street in Midtown, the city's arts district), the High is 312,000 square feet (28, ...

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Corcoran Gallery of Art The Corcoran Gallery of Art was an art museum in Washington, D.C., United States, that is now the location of the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design, a part of the George Washington University. Overview The Corcoran School of the Arts & Design ...

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Nasher Museum of Art The Nasher Museum of Art (previously the Duke University Museum of Art) is the art museum of Duke University, and is located on Duke's campus in Durham, North Carolina, United States. The Nasher, along with Dartmouth's Hood Museum of Art and Pr ...

Duke University Duke University is a private research university in Durham, North Carolina. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present-day city of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892. In 1924, tobacco and electric power industrialist James ...

. Select awards given to Petah Coyne include the

John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship Guggenheim Fellowships are Grant (money), grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative abi ...

, the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Residency, three National Endowment for the Arts Awards, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Artist Grant, the Joan Mitchell Foundation Sculpture Grant, the Asian Cultural Council Japan Fellowship, the New York Foundation for the Arts Sculpture Fellowship, the Anonymous Was a Woman Artist Grant, the Augustus Saint-Gaudens Memorial Foundation Sculpture Fellowship, the Massachusetts Council on the Arts and Humanities New Works Grant, and the Art Matters Artist Grant.

Early life and education

Coyne was born in

Oklahoma City, Oklahoma Oklahoma City (), officially the City of Oklahoma City, and often shortened to OKC, is the capital and largest city of the U.S. state of Oklahoma. The county seat of Oklahoma County, it ranks 20th among United States cities in population, and ...

in 1953 to a military family that moved frequently before settling in

Dayton, Ohio Dayton () is the sixth-largest city in the U.S. state of Ohio and the county seat of Montgomery County. A small part of the city extends into Greene County. The 2020 U.S. census estimate put the city population at 137,644, while Greater Day ...

. Although Coyne graduated from Oakwood High School, her mother home-schooled her in the summer so she could pass a number of classes early, making it possible for her to attend art classes at the

University of Dayton The University of Dayton (UD) is a private, Catholic research university in Dayton, Ohio. Founded in 1850 by the Society of Mary, it is one of three Marianist universities in the nation and the second-largest private university in Ohio. The univ ...

, go to local foundries, create bronze castings, and go on painting expeditions. She attended

Kent State University Kent State University (KSU) is a public research university in Kent, Ohio. The university also includes seven regional campuses in Northeast Ohio and additional facilities in the region and internationally. Regional campuses are located in As ...

from 1972-1973 and then the

Art Academy of Cincinnati The Art Academy of Cincinnati is a private college of art and design in Cincinnati, Ohio, accredited by the National Association of Schools of Art and Design. It was founded as the McMicken School of Design in 1869, and was a department of the U ...

, from which she graduated in 1977. She moved in 1977 with her husband, Lamar Hall, from Ohio to

SoHo Soho is an area of the City of Westminster, part of the West End of London. Originally a fashionable district for the aristocracy, it has been one of the main entertainment districts in the capital since the 19th century. The area was develop ...

Career

Coyne lives and works in New York. Recent solo exhibitions include: "Petah Coyne: Having Gone I Will Return" at Galerie Lelong & Co. (2018), "Petah Coyne: A Free Life" at Nunu Fine Art (2016), and "Petah Coyne: Everything that Rises Must Converge" at the

Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) is a museum in a converted Arnold Print Works factory building complex located in North Adams, Massachusetts. It is one of the largest centers for contemporary visual art and performing ar ...

(2010). Coyne is represented by Galerie Lelong & Co., in New York, and Nunu Fine Art in Taipei, Taiwan.

Recent solo exhibitions

"Petah Coyne: Having Gone I Will Return'',"'' at Galerie Lelong & Co., 2018

In 2018 Coyne had her first solo exhibition in New York City in over a decade, "Petah Coyne: Having Gone, I Will Return," at Galerie Lelong & Co. Enlisting the help of couture seamstresses, Coyne learned techniques to manipulate fabric and create a new monumental work, ''Untitled #1379 (The Doctor's Wife)'', which became the centerpiece of the exhibition. The piece was inspired by the book ''

The Doctor's Wife "The Doctor's Wife" is the fourth episode of the Doctor Who (series 6), sixth series of the British science fiction television series ''Doctor Who'', which was broadcast on 14 May 2011 in the United Kingdom, and later the same day in the Unite ...

'', a novel by

Sawako Ariyoshi Sawako Ariyoshi (有吉佐和子 ''Ariyoshi Sawako'', 20 January 1931 – 30 August 1984) was a Japanese writer, known for such works as ''The Doctor's Wife'' and ''The River Ki.'' She was known for her advocacy of social issues, such as the elde ...

written in 1966.

"Petah Coyne: A Free Life," at Nunu Fine Art, 2016

In 2016, Coyne had her first Taiwanese solo exhibition at Nunu Fine Art in Taipei. "Petah Coyne: A Free Life" featured a collection of dynamic black and white photographs alongside recent sculptures, such as ''Untitled #1424 (Zhang Yimou)'' and ''Untitled #1421 (Ha Jin)'', a large hanging work with blue and white waxed flowers surrounding a steel armature. This exhibition takes its name from

Ha Jin Jin Xuefei (; born February 21, 1956) is a Chinese-American poet and novelist using the pen name Ha Jin (). ''Ha'' comes from his favorite city, Harbin. His poetry is associated with the Misty Poetry movement. Early life Ha Jin was born in L ...

's 2007 novel, ''A Free Life''.

"Petah Coyne: Everything that Rises Must Converge," at MASS MoCA, 2010

Petah Coyne's 2010 solo exhibition, "Everything That Rises Must Converge," at the MASS MoCA (May 29, 2010) was her largest retrospective exhibition to date and featured large-scale mixed-media sculptures along with silver gelatin print photographs. The works included in the exhibition range from earlier, more abstract sculptures made from industrial materials, to newer ones made with delicate wax. In these newer works, Coyne layers wax-covered materials such as pearls, ribbons and silk flowers into large sculptural forms, often incorporating

taxidermied Taxidermy is the art of preserving an animal's body via mounting (over an armature) or stuffing, for the purpose of display or study. Animals are often, but not always, portrayed in a lifelike state. The word ''taxidermy'' describes the proc ...

birds and animals. Like the wide array of materials used throughout her oeuvre, Coyne derives inspiration from a variety of sources, such as literature, film, world culture, the natural environment, and personal stories. Her work is described as having a "Baroque sense of decadent refinement," imbued with a magical quality that details deeply personal responses to her inspirations, while inviting viewers to consider their own. This exhibition highlighted not only the diversity of Coyne's work and her innovative use of materials (including black sand, car parts, satin ribbons, trees, silk flowers, and taxidermy), but the relationships between the wide-ranging phases of her practice as it has evolved over time.

''The Real Guerrillas: The Early Years''

In 2016, Petah Coyne and Kathy Grove debuted their project ''The Real Guerrillas: The Early Years'', at Galerie Lelong in New York, ''Narrative/Collaborative,'' an exhibition of photographic works generated through collaborative practices. The

Guerrilla Girls Guerrilla Girls is an anonymous group of feminist, female artists devoted to fighting sexism and racism within the art world. The group formed in New York City in 1985 with the mission of bringing gender and racial inequality into focus within t ...

are an anonymous group of feminist, female artists devoted to fighting sexism and racism within the art world. The project comprises two portraits of each woman who participated from 1985 through 2000. One photographic portrait depicts the selected member as her "alias," masked and costumed while the second depicts the artist as herself, without a mask, in her studio surrounded by her work. As members pass away and their identities can be safely revealed, both portraits will be exhibited allowing their contributions to be fully acknowledged.

Quotes about Work

''Sculpture Magazine'' on "Petah Coyne: Having Gone I Will Return" ARTnews on "Petah Coyne: Everything That Rises Must Converge" According to the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art,

Early life and education

Career

Recent solo exhibitions

"Petah Coyne: Having Gone I Will Return'',"'' at Galerie Lelong & Co., 2018

"Petah Coyne: A Free Life," at Nunu Fine Art, 2016

"Petah Coyne: Everything that Rises Must Converge," at MASS MoCA, 2010

''The Real Guerrillas: The Early Years''

Quotes about Work

See also

References

External links