Artist Lauren Levato Coyne Reimagines Medusa’s Legacy in New Exhibition at UMass Amherst’s Kinney Center
What if Medusa’s story didn’t end with her death? What if her severed body became the source of an entire ecosystem of extraordinary creatures? Artist Lauren Levato Coyne explores these questions in Medusa’s Bestiary: Embodiments & Ecologies, a new exhibition at the Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies at UMass Amherst, where Levato Coyne serves as the Renaissance of the Earth Artist in Residence. The exhibition is on view through Spring 2027.
Drawing inspiration from early modern naturalists, fabulists, and artists, Levato Coyne imagines a New Gorgonia: a speculative ecosystem flourishing from Medusa’s abandoned body. Its inhabitants include hybrid creatures, mutants, monsters, and remarkable real-world species—from stone-skinned seahorses and reflective spiders to carnivorous plants, vampire moths, and double-headed reptiles. The exhibition brings myth into conversation with natural history, tracing surprising connections between early modern representations of Medusa and the natural world, including creatures depicted in Peter Paul Rubens’s The Head of Medusa (1618).
Blending artistic imagination, historical research, and environmental inquiry, Medusa’s Bestiary invites visitors to reconsider the boundaries between human and more-than-human life, myth and nature, and the familiar and the monstrous.
The exhibition is part of Renaissance of the Earth, a Kinney Center initiative that brings artists, students, and scholars together to draw on the early modern past in imagining more sustainable and equitable environmental futures.
Enjoy an interview with the Artist by Brooklyn Rail (here) & a feature story in the Daily Hampshire Gazette (here)