Seeing Petah Coyne’s America
Petah Coyne’s majestic installation Untitled #1541 (Two Halves of the Same Soul) (2023) at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts addresses a question posed by curators Deejay Duckett and Jodi Throckmorton for their exhibition Rising Sun: Artists in an Uncertain America. The title comes from Ben Franklin’s famous statement shortly after the signing of the Constitution: “I have wondered during these days whether that sunburst [carved on George Washington’s chair] represented a setting or a rising sun. With the adoption of this Constitution, I am now persuaded it is a rising sun.” The curators used this statement as a framework to commission over 20 artists at two institutions – the other is the African American Museum in Philadelphia – to address whether the sun is rising or setting on American democracy. This question seems especially urgent after the stormy years of Donald Trump’s presidency, the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns, deteriorating public trust in government institutions, as well as widespread racial and political unrest.
Coyne’s two-part installation is at once devastatingly dark and optimistically light. A knotty black tree stands dramatically lit at the center of a large, gray-walled gallery with seventeen white peacocks perched on its boughs. Folds of carefully arranged navy and inky black velvet sit on the floor under the dead tree, contrasting with blood red silk flowers adorning the branches above. The exhibition wall text explains that Coyne considers this scene, where the peacocks appear almost in conversation with each other, as representative of her generation’s failed promise to fulfill the possibility of a more fair and equal society. This apprehensive presentation is offset by a second grouping, accessible through a narrow wooden staircase leading up to a skylit platform. Here, flooded with light, the artist has hung eleven bright, colorful wax bouquets and nine peacocks perching in the rafters looking hopefully towards a light filled future.
Coyne is an artist whose explorations for over 40 years have continued to be impressive and culturally relevant while also visually compelling. In December 1989, Douglas Dreishpoon wrote a full-page review of Coyne’s simultaneous Brooklyn Museum and Jack Shainman exhibitions for Arts Magazine, noting:
Coyne’s installations constitute intimate gatherings. The spatial dynamic between pieces, their reciprocity and dialogue, are essential to their equipoise within an enclosed environment. Like individuals, they reveal subtle shifts of character. They are undeniably aggressive and threatening, and yet aloof, almost fragile. They appear foreboding and dangerous and yet distant and self-effacing; they demand interaction and yet reject intimacy. (The same elusive qualities characterize Lee Bontecou’s early constructions and the work of Eva Hesse.) They are silent sentinels, signs of struggle, catharsis, and psychic discharge. They are metaphors for life, death, and resurrection; order and chaos.
While Coyne has not yet attained the critical or commercial success of Bontecou or Hesse, Dreishpoon’s observations remain relevant and pertinent to Coyne’s work today. While some of the artist presentations in Rising Sun are stronger than others, Coyne’s sublime installation is visually moving and conceptually inspiring. And, in spite of its initial dramatic and disquieting impression, in the end she agrees with Franklin’s observations about the promise of America.
Rising Sun: Artists in an Uncertain America is on view at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (118-128 N Broad Street, Philadelphia, PA) and the African American Museum in Philadelphia (701 Arch Street, Philadelphia, PA) through October 8, 2023.
