Petah Coyne Artist Conversation with Amy Gilman, Director, Chazen Museum of Art

Contemporary sculptor and photographer Petah Coyne and Chazen Museum of Art Director Amy Gilman discuss Coyne's career, her art, and the behind-the-scenes work that brought the exhibition 'Petah Coyne: How Much A Heart Can Hold' to life.

Coyne is best known for her large-scale hanging sculptures and floor installations. Working in innovative and disparate materials, her media spans the organic to the ephemeral. Hair, mud, sticks, hay, dead fish, black sand, specially-formulated and patented wax, satin ribbons, silk flowers, and a shredded Airstream trailer are a few of the things she has incorporated into her sculptures. More recently, she has worked with glass, velvet, taxidermy, cast wax statuary, and trees. Unafraid to confront a range of subjects or tackle contemporary themes, Coyne’s innate dualities are transposed in the dichotomous themes of her work: transformation and constancy; life and loss; beauty and darkness. (petahcoyne.org)

Coyne has been the subject of more than 30 solo museum exhibitions and her work is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art (New York), Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York), Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (San Francisco), the Chazen and many others.

Earlier this year, Coyne received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Sculpture Center, and in November will be honored by the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art. Additional awards include those from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation, and three from the National Endowment for the Arts.

"Coyne’s sculptures convey tension between vulnerability and aggression, innocence and seduction, beauty and decadence, and, ultimately, life and death." — National Museum for Women in the Arts

Website: https://www.petahcoyne.org/

Chazen Museum of Art Website: https://chazen.wisc.edu/

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