Petah Coyne

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 (2010). A list of her solo and group exhibitions can be found on her resume. Coyne is represented by Galerie Lelong & Co., in New York, and Nunu Fine Art in Taipei, Taiwan.

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, a novel by Sawako Ariyoshi written in 1966.

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's 2007 novel, A Free Life.

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 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.

"Coyne belongs to a generation of sculptors—many of them women—who came of age in the late 1980s and forever changed the muscular practice of sculpture with their new interest in nature and a penchant for painstaking craftsmanship, domestic references and psychological metaphor."

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 birds and animals.

She moved in 1977 with her husband, Lamar Hall, from Ohio to SoHo.

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.

Coyne was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma in 1953 to a military family that moved frequently before settling in Dayton, Ohio. 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, go to local foundries, create bronze castings, and go on painting expeditions. She attended Kent State University from 1972-1973 and then the Art Academy of Cincinnati, from which she graduated in 1977.