On display until March 14, 2026, the Lowe Art Museum at the University of Miami is showing Petah Coyne: How Much A Heart Can Hold, featuring more than a dozen expansive mixed-media sculptures spanning decades of work by one of America’s most celebrated contemporary sculptors.
Pulsing at the heart of this museum show is Coyne’s fascination with female identity, and her deep reverence for under-recognized women writers and historical figures, including Zelda Fitzgerald, Joan Didion, Zora Neale Hurston, Jane Austen, and more.
Coyne is best known for the elaborate physicalities of her large-scale hanging sculptures and monumental floor installations, laborious and time-intensive to create. The exhibition focuses on the ways her artistic process is inspired by women’s creativity — especially her use of seductive materials to create towering sculptures that bring the viewer in, while confronting the barriers women face.
“I think the only way for an artist to know or understand anything is to make work almost from a blind spot, and what you produce speaks to you. Before I begin a sculpture, I never know where I am going to go,” shares Coyne. “I think women in particular are given this intuitive instinct. We have this power and we must learn to trust it.”
A quote by Zelda Fitzgerald inspired the exhibition title: “Nobody has ever measured, even the poets, how much a heart can hold,” said the American writer, dancer and painter. Fittingly, Coyne’s monumental sculpture Zelda is named in Fitzgerald’s honor and anchors the exhibition.
Constructed from an astonishing range of materials, the seven-foot-tall work explores Fitzgerald’s legacy, capturing both her brilliance and the professional constraints and obstacles she endured. 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.
“Petah Coyne reminds what it is to be human — heart, body, mind, and soul,” says Dr. Jill Deupi, the Lowe Art Museum’s Beaux Arts Executive Director and Chief Curator. “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.”
While her sculptures are meticulously constructed, Coyne embraces a process rooted in intuition and emotion, often crafting works without preliminary drawings or plans. Pre-planning is not a part of her artistic process.
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.”
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