Petah Coyne

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 Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Denver Art Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Smithsonian Institution, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kiasma in Finland, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, the Toledo Museum of Art, the High Museum of Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University. to a military family that moved frequently before settling in Dayton, Ohio.

She moved in 1977 with her husband, Lamar Hall, from Ohio to SoHo. Career Untitled #1458 (Marguerite Duras), 2019-2020, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C. 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). Coyne is represented by Galerie Lelong & Co., in New York, and Nunu Fine Art in Taipei, Taiwan. "Petah Coyne: Having Gone, I Will Return," at Galerie Lelong & Co. "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. 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. The Guerrilla Girls are an anonymous group of feminist, female artists devoted to fighting sexism and racism within the art world.