Petah Coyne is a contemporary American sculptor and photographer. Since the 1980s, Coyne has received critical acclaim for using intricate, unorthodox material—trees, human hair, scrap metal, wax, silk flowers, black sand, and taxidermy—to 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 individual’s soul are all springboards for Coyne’s incessant and unrelenting imagination. In Coyne’s hands, materials, like our lived experiences, are endlessly re-purposed and reborn into something new.

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Coyne’s sculptures and photographs have been the subject of more than 45 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 Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; 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; Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Canada: Museum of Contemporary Art of Montreal, Canada; and many others. She is the past recipient of grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Award, the Rockefeller Foundation Award, Asian Cultural Council Award, Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award, the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award, Lifetime Achievement Award from International Sculpture Center, and Anonymous was a Woman, among many more.

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Coyne has been reviewed by Art in America, Artforum, Artnet, ARTnews Magazine, Artspace, BOMB Magazine, ELLE Italia, ELLE Taiwan, Frieze, Hyperallergic, Los Angeles Times, New York Magazine, Newsday, Sculpture, The Brooklyn Rail, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Times (London), The Wall Street Journal, Vogue Magazine and many others.

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Born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, in 1953, the artist currently lives and works in New York City and is represented by Galerie Lelong.