Petah Coyne: How Much a Heart Can Hold
– Last Four Weeks to Experience this Wonderland of Physical Forms at the Lowe Art Museum at the University of Miami ‒ On view until March 14
إن Lowe Art Museum at the University of Miami proudly presents 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. These extraordinary landscapes of physical forms are on view now through March 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.
Pulsing at the heart of this museum show is Coyne’s fascination with female identity, and her deep reverence for underrecognized women writers and historical figures, including Zelda Fitzgerald, Joan Didion, Zora Neale Hurston, Jane Austen, and more. The exhibition focuses on how her artistic process is inspired by women’s creativity—especially her use of seductive materials to create towering sculptures that draw the viewer in while confronting the barriers women face. She is best known for the elaborate physicality of her large-scale hanging sculptures and monumental floor installations, which are 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. I think women in particular are given this intuitive instinct. We have this power, and we must learn to trust it,” says Petah Coyne. “I am thrilled that this exhibition is traveling to university museums. University students are so open, and they are thinking constantly,” says Coyne.
“Petah Coyne reminds us what it is to be human — heart, body, mind, and soul,” says 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,” adds Dr. Deupi.
A quote by Zelda Fitzgerald inspired the exhibition title: “Nobody has ever measured, even the poets, how much a heart can hold,” said the American writer, dancer, and painter. Fittingly, Coyne’s monumental sculpture Zelda, named in Fitzgerald’s honor, anchors the exhibition. Constructed from an astonishing range of materials, the seven-foot-tall work explores Fitzgerald’s legacy, capturing both her brilliance and the professional constraints and obstacles she endured.
زيلدا engages the tactile senses, yet a transparent glass box separates the viewer from the monochromatic work, representing a cage that metaphorizes Zelda Fitzgerald’s life. Her accomplishments were thwarted by the oppressive time in which she lived, and overshadowed by her marriage to F. Scott Fitzgerald (many lines from her letters appear in her husband’s writings).
Literature, film, art history, and the depths of an individual’s soul are all springboards for Coyne’s incessant and unrelenting imagination. Because she has dyslexia, the stories in the books that inspire her are often processed differently by Coyne. She attributes the resulting artworks that hang from the ceiling (instead of standing on the floor) to her dyslexia. In Coyne’s hands, materials, like our lived experiences, are endlessly re-purposed and reborn into something new. A lover of objects, she 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 (first photo on page one of this press release) is made from a 1950s Airstream trailer that was totaled in an accident and shredded into thin stainless-steel wire resembling hair, sourced 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,” says Coyne.
The New York-based artist has been featured in more than 45 solo museum exhibitions 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, 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, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and many others. Read more about the artist at www.petahcoyne.org.
While her sculptures are meticulously constructed, Coyne embraces a process rooted in intuition and emotion, often crafting works without preliminary drawings or plans. Pre-planning is not a part of her artistic process. She allows her feelings to guide her work. Although she has her own ideas about her finished works, she wants viewers to experience her art in the same way she approaches creating it, openheartedly.
“I hope they open up their hearts and just look at the pieces,” says Coyne. “It doesn’t matter what I feel about the work or what I made it for. If you just open yourself, you’ll feel something, and that would be the most wonderful thing if they would do that.”
Petah Coyne: How Much A Heart Can Hold was organized by the Chazen Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin–Madison, and curated by Amy Gilman, the Director of the Chazen. The exhibition is organized into three thematic sections: Women’s Work, Women Obscured and Transformedو Women’s Relationships. Visitors will also view a wall featuring the multi-paneled photo project entitled “The Real Guerrillas: The Early Years.” The project is an ongoing collaboration with artist Kathy Grove to photograph the Guerrilla Girls, an anonymous artist-activist group that formed in New York in 1985 to expose gender and ethnic bias in الفن و الثقافة.
About the Lowe Art Museum
Founded in 1950, the Lowe Art Museum houses nearly 19,000 works of art that collectively represent 5,000 years of human creativity from around the globe. Its extensive permanent collection galleries are complemented by a robust schedule of temporary exhibitions and engaging public programs throughout the year. Located on the University of Miami campus (1301 Stanford Drive), the Lowe is open Wed., Thurs., Fri., and Sat., 10:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m. The museum also has after-hours events and virtual programs, and a dedicated قناة يوتيوب where prior programs and lectures are archived.
General admission is free. Additionally, the Lowe is a member of the North American Reciprocal Museum
Association, فإن Southeastern Reciprocal Membership Program, the College and University Art Museums Reciprocal Program, and is a Blue Star Museum. لمزيد من المعلومات، يرجى زيارة lowe.miami.edu or call 305-284-3535.
About the University of Miami
إن University of Miami’s mission is to educate and nurture students, to create knowledge, and to provide service to our community and beyond. Committed to excellence and proud of the diversity of our University family, we strive to develop future leaders of our nation and the world.
