Art Department Hosts 'Queen of Mixed Media'

Photo Submitted

Petah Coyne visiting with guests in the Fine Arts Center Gallery

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – The department of art in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences is gaining national recognition through visits from prestigious guest artists.

The department hosted several visitors in November for an exclusive dinner with guest artist Petah Coyne. Coyne was on campus for several events with students, faculty, staff and friends of the department. Her visit included a public reception and lecture and a private dinner with the department’s advisory board and other invited guests.

“You have a very extraordinary school here,” Coyne said during her public lecture.

Coyne, referred to as "the queen of mixed media," by Artforum, is a contemporary sculptor and photographer working in innovative and disparate materials. Ranging from the organic to the ephemeral, her works incorporate dead fish, mud, sticks, hay, black sand, specially-formulated and patented wax, satin ribbons, velvet, silk flowers, and more recently, taxidermy and cast wax statues.

An Oklahoma native, Coyne had not visited Arkansas since she was a child. “You always have pre-conceived ideas of what you’re going to find,” she said. “But I had no idea that I was going to be quite so excited about what I did find.”

The Fine Arts Center Gallery featured some of Coyne’s work as part of the exhibition Resonance: Audible Silence in Portraiture. Her work is also in the permanent collections of many museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, High Museum of Art in Atlanta and Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University. Select awards include the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Award, the Rockefeller Foundation Award, three National Endowment for the Arts awards, Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award.

The department of art will close the fall semester with three major events. The MFA Student Exhibit, a group exhibition by students pursuing a Master of Fine Arts, may be seen Dec. 13 and 14 at sUgAR, the university’s student art gallery on the basement level of One East Square Plaza in Fayetteville. The Winter Holiday Sale and Open Studio Event is scheduled from 12 noon to 7 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 14, in the ceramics studio at 326 Eastern Ave. in Fayetteville. The Senior Capstone Exhibit, also at sUgAR, will begin at 6 p.m. Thursday, Dec. 19.

The department of art will continue hosting lectures, workshops and exhibitions with guest artists in the coming months, including Peter Kruty on Feb. 6, Marat Paransky on Feb. 11 and Susan Lichtman on Feb 20. The department will also welcome Lesley Dill for an extended stay in the spring as a McIlroy Family Visiting Professor in the Visual and Performing Arts.

More information on events and programs is available on the websites for the department of art or the Fine Arts Center Gallery.