Petah Coyne
Petah Coyne (born 1953) is an American sculptor and photographer. She is known for her large-scale sculptures composed of unconventional, and often organic, materials, such as clay, silk, wax, and hair. Coyne's sculptures and photographs have been the subject of more than 30 solo museum exhibitions. Some of her works are in the permanent collections of museums and galleries such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Toledo Museum of Art, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University.

Early life and education
Coyne was born in Oklahoma City in 1953 to a military family that moved several times before settling in Dayton, OH when she was twelve. Coyne was home-schooled and as a teenager took courses at the University of Dayton. She attended Kent State University from 1972-1973 and then the Art Academy of Cincinnati, from which she graduated in 1977.

She moved in 1977 with her husband, Lamar Hall, from Ohio to Broome Street in New York.

Career
Coyne lives and works in New York and New Jersey.
A list of her solo and group exhibitions can be found on her resume.

The Real Guerrillas: The Early Years
In 2016, Petah Coyne and Kathy Grove debuted their project The Real Guerrillas: The Early Years, at Galerie Lelong in New York, Narrative/Collaborative, an exhibition of photographic works generated through collaborative practices. The Guerrilla Girls are an anonymous group of feminist, female artists devoted to fighting sexism and racism within the art world. The project comprises two portraits of each woman who participated from 1985 through 2000. One photographic portrait depicts the selected member as her "alias", masked and costumed while the second depicts the artist as herself, without a mask, in her studio surrounded by her work. As members pass away and their identities can be safely revealed, both portraits will be exhibited allowing their contributions to be fully acknowledged.

Recent solo exhibitions
In 2018 Coyne had a solo exhibition, "Petah Coyne: Having Gone, I Will Return," at Galerie Lelong & Co., New York, New York. Coyne found couture seamstresses to teach her techniques that she manipulated to create a new velvet work, Untitled #1379 (The Doctor's Wife), which became the centerpiece of the exhibition. The piece was based on the book The Doctor's Wife, a novel by Sawako Ariyoshi written in 1966.

Her solo exhibition, "Everything That Rises Must Converge", at the Mass MoCA (May 29, 2010) featured large-scale mixed-media sculptures along with silver gelatin print photographs.  Coyne layers wax-soaked materials such as pearls, ribbons and silk flowers into large sculptural forms, often incorporating taxidermied birds and animals. In addition to the range in artistic media across her works, Coyne derives inspiration from a wide variety of sources, from literature and film to world culture and the natural environment.

Quotes about Work 
According to the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art,

Quote from Coyne on her wax works in 1994: