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Petah Coyne
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| 1953 |
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Born, Oklahoma
City, Oklahoma. Her father in the military, and her mother a writer
who studied Ikebana and received an MA in Japanese flower arranging.
Due to father’s profession, the family moves frequently. In
each place, the family insists upon living in neighborhoods instead
of on the base.
In Germany,
we lived in the German neighborhoods. In Ohio, we lived with the
Amish for a summer. In every location, we were encouraged to study
the beliefs and customs. I always felt more connected through these
experiences.
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| 1957-60 |
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Lives
in a Japanese neighborhood in Hawaii, documented to be her favorite
home while growing up. Japanese culture will greatly influence Coyne’s
artistic vision in years to come. |
| 1953-71 |
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Raised as
a Catholic. During childhood, documents imperfections each year
in a book titled My Graces and My Sins. Constantly strives
for goodness and selflessness, to achieve a state of holiness. Looks
back on these experiences with awe and is fascinated with the female’s
stance in the Catholic Church, beginning with the way in which young
girls are continually drilled on their goodness and selflessness.
Dissatisfied with school, her mother begins tutoring her, and her
siblings, during the summer, enabling her to test out of classes
during the school year.
Every room
was a different lesson. One would be the history room, another the
math room and we’d move from room to room every forty-five
minutes.
Having sacrificed
summers, and with her mother’s encouragement, she is able to
devote more time during the school year to her art.
Once when
I wanted to do some bronze casting, my mother took me to the local
foundry, and we learned how to cast and pour bronze. She was a great
role model, fashioning whatever was needed to reach our goal.
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| 1972-3 |
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Studies
at Kent State University, Ohio. |
| 1977 |
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Studies
at Art Academy of Cincinnati, Ohio. |
| 1978 |
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Moves
to New York, New York. Works for Chanel’s in-house advertising
department. Becomes fascinated with dead fish, initiating a project
photographing them hanging from trees. During weekends, she travels
to Boston to work at a hospice with terminally ill patients. |
| 1991 |
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Lives
in Japan for six months on an Asian Cultural Council Rockefeller Grant.
Travels extensively and reads voraciously about the culture. Develops
a love of Japanese literature.
While in Kyoto, Japan, she views a display of braided human hair dating
from the seventeenth century. The hair had been used as ropes when
the poor people of the town were building a Buddhist temple. Women
had sacrificed their hair so trees could be hauled from the forest
more efficiently. |
| 1994 |
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Friend
and fellow artist Ann Hamilton dismantles installation piece, a massive
undulating carpet made from horsehair, at Dia Center for the Arts
in New York. Gives the hair to Coyne. |
| 1995 |
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Begins
employing horsehair in her art. |
| 1996 |
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Brother
dies of cancer. Begins exploring the relationship between hair and
suffering, entanglement and liberation, life and death. |
| 1997 |
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Fairy
Tales opens at Galerie Lelong, New York. Culminates her experimentation
with hair, braided and woven around five diminutive Madonnas and animal
figures such as a fox and birds. |
| 1998 |
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Begins
White Rain, an installation envisioned as a response to the
black rain from the fall-out after the bombing of Hiroshima at the
end of World War II. Draws inspiration from Marcel Duchamp, Chinese
landscape painting of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Japanese
literature, and Butoh, the dance of the dead which emerged in Japan
in 1959. |
| 2001 |
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White
Rain opens at the Galerie Lelong. |
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Petah
Coyne lives and works in New York, New York |
