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Petah Coyne

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Petah Coyne
Born1953
Oklahoma City
EducationArt Academy of Cincinnati, Kent State University
Known forSculpture
AwardsJoan Mitchell Foundation Award for Sculpture (1998), John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (1989)[2]

Petah Coyne (born 1953) is an American sculptor and photographer. She is known for her large-scale sculptures composed of unconventional, and often organic, materials, such as clay, silk, wax, and hair.[3] Coyne’s sculptures and photographs have been the subject of more than 30 solo museum exhibitions.[4] Some of her works are in the permanent collections of museums and galleries such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Toledo Museum of Art, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the Corcoran Gallery of Art,[5] and the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University.[6]

Early life and education

Coyne was born in Oklahoma City in 1953[7] to a military family that moved several times before settling in Dayton, OH when she was twelve.[1][3] Coyne was home-schooled and as a teenager took courses at the University of Dayton.[1][3] She attended Kent State University from 1972-1973 and then the Art Academy of Cincinnati, from which she graduated in 1977.[8]

She moved in 1977 with her husband, Lamar Hall, from Ohio to Broome Street in New York.[9]

Career

Coyne lives and works in New York and New Jersey.[10] A list of her solo and group exhibitions can be found on her resume.

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.[11] The Guerrilla Girls are an anonymous group of feminist, female artists devoted to fighting sexism and racism within the art world.[9] 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.[12]

Recent Solo Exhibitions

In 2018 Coyne had a solo exhibition, "Petah Coyne: Having Gone, I Will Return," at Galerie Lelong & Co., New York, New York.[9] Coyne found couture seamstresses to teach her techniques that she manipulated to create a new velvet work, “Untitled #1379 (The Doctor’s Wife),” which became the centerpiece of the exhibition.[9] The piece was based on the book, The Doctor's Wife, a novel by Sawako Ariyoshi written in 1966.

Her solo exhibition, “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” at the Mass MoCA (May 29, 2010)[13] featured large-scale mixed-media sculptures along with silver gelatin print photographs. Coyne layers wax-soaked materials such as pearls, ribbons and silk flowers into large sculptural forms, often incorporating taxidermied birds and animals.[3] In addition to the range in artistic media across her works, Coyne derives inspiration from a wide variety of sources, from literature and film to world culture and the natural environment.

"The works in this largest retrospective of the artist’s work to date range from her earlier and more abstract sculptures using industrial materials to newer works made of delicate wax. All of Coyne’s works take inspiration from personal stories, film, literature and political events. Coyne takes these sources and applies a Baroque sense of decadent refinement, imbuing her work with a magical quality to evoke intensely personal associations. Together these diverse yet intimately connected periods of Coyne’s practice make evident an evolution, which highlights the artist’s own blend of symbolism alongside an innovative use of materials including black sand, car parts, wax, satin ribbons, trees, silk flowers, and taxidermy." - Mass MoCA[14]

Quotes about Work

According to the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art,[15]

"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."

— Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art
Unforgiven sculpture by Petah Coyne

Quote from Coyne on her wax works in 1994:

"So that's what I'm trying to do with the white wax pieces I'm doing now - they're about those times that are almost perfect but not quite. You go searching to meet them again, and you're all excited, and it's never quite the same - but you always have the memory. So it's not just about people passing, it's more about friendships that have gone awry or people who have strayed. Just basically, humanity. That's what all these pieces are about.


I wanted to shift away from black, and I didn't know what I wanted to do, so I began to work with Irene Hultman. We did this whole installation, half black, half white, and there was also a performance in which she wore the pieces, or her dancers did. A lot of them come out of hat shapes or chandeliers. The wax is not a normal wax, it's made by a chemist so that it won't melt except at very high temperatures. It can get up to 180 degrees before it melts. In the summer my studio can get up to 120, 125, and in the winter I don't have heat so it's very cold. So these pieces have to be able to freeze."

— Petah Coyne March 24, 1994. In her Studio, Greenpoint, Brooklyn


See also

  • Inside the Artist's Studio, Princeton Architectural Press, 2015. (ISBN 978-1616893040)

References

  1. ^ a b c d Dobrzynski, Judith H. "Steadily Weaving Toward Her Goal; Petah Coyne's Art Strategy Has Its Scary Moments". New York Times. Retrieved June 3, 2013.
  2. ^ "Artist Bio--Petah Coyne". Artists Take on Detroit. Detroit Institute of Arts. Retrieved June 3, 2013.
  3. ^ a b c d "Artist Spotlight: Petah Coyne–How to Hang 150 Pounds of Wax from the Ceiling". Broad Strokes: NMWA's Blog for the 21st Century. Retrieved June 3, 2013.
  4. ^ "Petah Coyne - Artists - Galerie Lelong". www.galerielelong.com. Retrieved 2019-03-30.
  5. ^ Dobrztbski, Judith H. (October 06, 1998). "Steadily Weaving Toward Her Goal; Petah Coyne's Art Strategy Has Its Scary Moments". New York Times.
  6. ^ Vogel, Carol (January 20, 2006). "A Titian Travels to Washington". New York Times.
  7. ^ Phaidon Editors (2019). Great women artists. Phaidon Press. p. 109. ISBN 0714878774. {{cite book}}: |last1= has generic name (help)
  8. ^ "Petah Coyne". National Museum of Women in the Arts. Retrieved June 3, 2013.
  9. ^ a b c d Sheets, Hilarie M. (2018-09-13). "An Artist Who Champions and Channels Female Voices". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2019-03-30.
  10. ^ Richards, Judith Olch (ed.) (2004) Inside the Studio: Two Decades of Talks with Artists in New York. ICI. New York.
  11. ^ "The Real Guerrilla Girls, Galerie Lelong, New York". Galerie Lelong & Co. Retrieved 2019-12-02.
  12. ^ "Petah Coyne and Kathy Grove at Galerie Lelong, New York". ocula.com. 2019-03-30. Retrieved 2019-03-30.
  13. ^ "Petah Coyne: Everything That Rises Must Converge". Mass MoCA. Retrieved 2011-10-13.
  14. ^ "Petah Coyne - Everything That Rises Must Converge" (exhibit brochure). Mass MoCA. May 31, 2010.
  15. ^ "Petah Coyne: Above and Beneath the Skin". Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art. Retrieved 2011-10-13.
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