MIAMI, FLA.- Galerie Lelong, New York announced that Petah Coyne: How Much A Heart Can Hold is on view at the Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami through March 14, 2026. This exhibition invites the viewer to explore Petah Coynes work as a multifaceted and long-running conversation about the complexity and creativity of women.
It is divided into three sections: Womens Work, Womens Relationships, and Women Obscured & Transformed. Originally intended as an exhibition organizational structure that avoided the pull of a chronological arrangement, it is now clear that all the works reside in each of the categories, and now these three threads weave and plait together as part of a more nuanced understanding not only of Coynes oeuvre, but also how a single artists work is intertwined and in dialogue with friends and creatives both near in time and space, and long past or far afield.
Petah Coyne: How Much a Heart Can Hold is organized by the Chazen Museum of Art, University of WisconsinMadison, where it was on view in Fall 2024, and will travel to the Neuberger Museum of Art at Purchase College in Spring 2026.
Petah Coyne is a contemporary American sculptor and photographer. Since the 1980s, Coyne has received critical acclaim for using intricate, unorthodox materialtrees, human hair, scrap metal, wax, silk flowers, religious statuary, and taxidermyto create sculptures that are both precise in their attention to detail and baroque in their emotional range. Literature, film, art history, and the depths of an individuals soul are all springboards for Coynes incessant and unrelenting imagination. In Coynes hands, materials, like our lived experiences, are endlessly re-purposed and reborn into something new.
Coynes sculptures and photographs have been the subject of more than 30 solo museum exhibitions. Her work resides in numerous permanent museum collections including 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; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, California; Museum of Contemporary Art KIASMA, Finland; and many others. She is the past recipient of grants from the Pollock Krasner Foundation, Anonymous was a Woman, and the Guggenheim Foundation.
Born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, in 1953, the artist currently lives in New York City.