Petah Coyne's Sculptures Explore Femininity and Legacy at Lowe Art Museum

The Lowe Art Museum at the University of Miami proudly presents “Petah Coyne: How Much A Heart Can Hold,” on view now through March 14, 2026. Several of these works are on tour for the first time. “Petah Coyne reminds what it is to be human — heart, body, mind, and soul,” says Dr. Jill Deupi, the Beaux Arts Director and Chief Curator of the Lowe Art Museum. “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. The exhibition highlights Coyne’s fascination with female identity and her deep reverence for underrecognized women writers and historical figures, and is organized into three thematic sections — “Women’s Work,” “Women Obscured and Transformed,” and “Women’s Relationships.” 

“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, director of the Chazen. Featuring over a dozen expansive, mixed-media sculptures, this evocative exhibition spans decades of work by contemporary American sculptor Petah Coyne, offering a deeply intimate and tactile meditation on femininity, women’s complexity and creativity, and the power of artistic transformation.  

The exhibition takes its title from a quote by author Zelda Fitzgerald: “Nobody has ever measured, even the poets, how much a heart can hold.”

Fittingly, Coyne’s monumental sculpture “Zelda” anchors the show. Constructed from an astonishing range of materials— including wax, silk flowers, hat pins, knitting needles, pearls, and horsehair—the nearly seven-foot-tall work explores Fitzgerald’s legacy, capturing both her brilliance and the professional constraints she endured. “This piece wasn’t planned,” Coyne recalls. “When I finished it and stepped back, I knew immediately — it was her.” 

“Zelda” ignites the tactile senses, yet a transparent glass box stands between the viewer and the monochromatic work, representing a cage that is a metaphor for Zelda Fitzgerald’s life. Her accomplishments were thwarted by the 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.

At nearly seven feet tall, the mixed-media work from the Chazen Museum of Art’s collection is made of silk flowers, wax, acrylic paint, white pearl-headed hat pins, artificial pearls, cast-wax statuary figure and hand sculptures, ribbon, knitting needles, fabric, thread, wire, horsehair, drywall, plaster, filament, rubber, steel and wood

Coyne often celebrates under-recognized female authors and Eastern literary figures. Her works showcase the authors and characters; dissect their complex stories; and examine how relationships, social constructs and self-image can shape how women — real and fictional — experience and navigate the world.

The artist admits that pre-planning is not a part of her artistic process. While other artists start with mockups and drawings, 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 — with an open heart. “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.” 

Coyne’s work defies categorization, blending sculpture, assemblage, literature, and performance. Her distinctive materials — ranging from Venetian velvet to shredded Airstream trailers — are as varied and nuanced as the stories she tells. While her sculptures are meticulously constructed, Coyne embraces a process rooted in intuition and emotion, often crafting works without preliminary drawings or plans. 

Coyne finds materials in various ways and tries to push them as far as she can. Over the years, they have ranged from the organic to the ephemeral including dead fish, mud, sticks, hay, black sand, satin ribbons and taxidermy.  

Petah Coyne (b. 1953, Oklahoma City) has been the subject of more than 30 solo museum exhibitions. She 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. 

Last year, Coyne received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Sculpture Center, and in November 2024 was honored by the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art. Additional awards include those from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation, three from the National Endowment for the Arts, Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, Asian Cultural Council, New York Foundation for the Arts, Anonymous Was A Woman, Augustus Saint-Gaudens Memorial Foundation, three from Artists Space, the Art Matters Award, two International Association of Art Critics Awards and the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art Award in the Visual Arts.