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The Lowe Art Museum at the University of Miami is presenting “Petah Coyne: How Much A Heart Can Hold,” featuring more than a dozen expansive mixed-media sculptures spanning decades of work by one of America’s most celebrated contemporary sculptors.
Pulsing at the heart of this museum show is Coyne’s fascination with female identity, and her deep reverence for under-recognized women writers and historical figures, including Zelda Fitzgerald, Joan Didion, Zora Neale Hurston, Jane Austen, and more.
The exhibition focuses on the ways her artistic process is inspired by women’s creativity — especially her use of seductive materials to create towering sculptures that bring the viewer in, while confronting the barriers women face.
These extraordinary landscapes of physical forms are on view through Mar. 14. The sprawling installations and tactile meditations honor the creative power of women through artistic transformation.
Several works are on tour for the first time, and some have never been shown in museums.
She is best known for the elaborate physicalities of her large-scale hanging sculptures and monumental floor installations, laborious and time-intensive to create.
“I think the only way for an artist to know or understand anything is to make work almost from a blind spot, and what you produce speaks to you. Before I begin a sculpture I never know where I am going to go,” Coyne said.
“I think women in particular are given this intuitive instinct. We have this power and we must learn to trust it. I am thrilled that this exhibition is traveling to university museums. University students are so open, and they are thinking constantly,” Coyne added.
“Petah Coyne reminds what it is to be human — heart, body, mind, and soul,” said Dr. Jill Deupi, the Lowe Art Museum’s Beaux Arts executive director and chief curator.
“This remarkable exhibition invites us into a wonderland of physical forms whose manifold sources of inspiration are as broad as they are compelling. The viewer leaves the show feeling not only newly inspired, but also newly alive through her work,” Dr. Deupi added.
A lover of objects, Coyne gathers her unorthodox materials from everywhere and wrestles with them until they come together perfectly, pushing them as far as she can. She has received critical acclaim for using intricate, unconventional materials — trees, human hair, dead fish, mud, shackles, scrap metal, wax, silk flowers, black sand, hospital bandages, chandeliers, taxidermy, and more — to create sculptures that are both precise in their attention to detail and baroque in their emotional range.
One of the large-scale sculptures in this exhibition is made of a 1950s Airstream trailer that was totaled in an accident and shredded into thin stainless-steel wire that looks like hair, from a facility that shreds and recycles metals from cars, trains and trucks.
“I spoke to this object and told this Airstream trailer that even though it had been totaled, I would give it new life by sending it to museums for people to enjoy, allowing it to live forever,” Coyne said.
The New York-based artist has been chosen for more than 45 solo museum shows throughout her career. In 2024, Coyne received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Sculpture Center.
Her national honors include awards from the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, three awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, two International Association of Art Critics Awards, and more.
Her work is held in the permanent collections of several leading institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, and many others.
Lezrn more about the artist at www.petahcoyne.org.
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