Medusa did not get a good deal.
As the Roman poet Ovid tells it, Medusa, a Gorgon in Greek mythology, was sexually assaulted by a god inside the goddess Minerva’s temple. Minerva gave her snakes for hair — as punishment, the source text says. Medusa could turn people to stone by looking at them. She was beheaded as she slept. When she died, two creatures sprang fully formed from her neck — one, the winged horse Pegasus; the other, the boar-headed giant Chrysaor. Her killer took her head and used it as a weapon for his own purposes. She had no choice in any of it.
But what happened to her body?
In a new show in Amherst, artist and writer Lauren Levato Coyne imagines a way to redeem Medusa’s story by making her abandoned body a site of growth, creating new, fantastical life from tragedy.
“She’s a very small part of the Metamorphoses — I think maybe five pages total. … But it is such a deep story,” Levato Coyne said. “It’s such a generous story. It keeps giving itself over to interpretations and evolutions, generation after generation.”
“Medusa’s Bestiary: Embodiments & Ecologies,” created by Levato Coyne, opens at the Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst on Saturday, Sept. 26, and runs through Monday, May 31, 2027. There will be an opening reception on the 26th from 1 to 3 p.m. and an artist’s talk at 2 p.m.
The show features paintings and sculpted pieces paired with thematically connected Renaissance texts, which Levato Coyne spent almost a year choosing from the Kinney Center’s collection.
“I’ve loved the Medusa story my whole life,” she said. She recalled watching the stop-motion Medusa character in Ray Harryhausen’s 1981 movie “Clash of the Titans” with her father when she was younger. Though that character was terrifying, “You get older and you start recognizing the sexism and depravity that is deep within the story, and I think there’s a lot to explore there,” she said.
“Any way you slice it, she was just harassed for her whole damn life,” she added.
The works on display showcase a surreal menagerie of flora and fauna in an ecosystem that Levato Coyne calls “New Gorgonia” — there’s a pink frog with red coral growing out of its back in one work, a snake with the head of an owl in another. Red coral is a recurring theme in many of the pieces; according to myth, it was formed when Perseus placed Medusa’s severed head on a riverbank on a bed of seaweed.
Atop a shelf of books by or about Shakespeare is a piece that’s “maybe a little Addams Family,” Levato Coyne said, referencing the character Thing, a sentient disembodied hand. Her creation is an assemblage of found objects that includes a green hand made of concrete, emerging from a magpie shell and sprouting black coral (crafted from glass by Williams College professor emeritus Jay Thoman) on its back.
“Her quote-unquote ‘victims’ are always turned to stone in the stories,” Levato Coyne said. “But what if she’s able to also generate stones? What if stones become an animate part of her legacy?”
Above it is a painting inspired by Dutch painter Otto Marseus van Schrieck, which features tiger moths with blooms of wings in various colors around their heads, as if the bugs themselves were flying flowers. Levato Coyne said with a laugh, “I don’t know how this would function [in real life].” In fact, she took the idea for the work from the notion that van Schrieck’s landscapes were all works of “radical fiction” because the flora and fauna he painted didn’t all live in the environments in which he painted them.
She also thought about the notion of adaptation, especially in a climate crisis: “In their ecologies where they occur, [tiger moths] are a keystone species, and we don’t normally think of such a small creature as being a keystone species. But when they disappear from their environments, their environments collapse,” she said. “So [I was] thinking about the collapse of environments, rebuilding environments, how we would survive in the future, but also, how would a fictional landscape emerge?”
Levato Coyne is a lifelong fan of interesting creatures, including bugs. She has a number of them tattooed larger-than-life on her own body. A self-described “critter kid” who loves natural history and “would read books up in trees” when she was young, Levato Coyne said, “The fact that I’m having an exhibition about Medusa in a library — 7-year-old me, 15-year-old me, couldn’t be happier.” She works at Williams College, where she teaches science students how to draw.
She also connects with the Medusa story on another level: she’s a survivor of sexual violence and a queer woman. (While Medusa is not explicitly queer in the source text, Levato Coyne considers her a “queer icon,” she said, because she provides “fierce iconography” for people who have “righteous anger and a desire to protect selfhood” that they are often forced to defend, to “fight back and plant their feet just to exist.”)
“The story of being betrayed, the story of being persecuted and pursued — a lot of people can relate to that story, even if we can’t, hopefully, ever relate to being decapitated. I think that her story may be especially beloved in America because it’s kind of got everything in it — betrayal, revenge,” she said.
“One side of the story thinks there’s justice; another side does not,” she continued. “If you see it from Medusa’s perspective, there’s no justice. But if you’re looking at it from Perseus’ perspective, it’s completely justified. … In the middle of the wars that we’re starting and the very visible racisms that we see, this story is still, politically, very, very contemporary.”
Levato Coyne is the current artist-in-residence at the Kinney Center, and this show is part of its project The Renaissance of the Earth, which looks to connect modern-day ecological questions with early modern thinking.
“Our idea of nature that we still have today was really formed in the 16th and 17th [centuries]. We still look to those researchers for a lot of things, and they set the foundation for a lot of natural history and scientific procedures. Taxonomy came out of the Renaissance, and it is still an emerging field because it’s constantly changing,” she said.
Kinney Center Director Marjorie Rubright said Levato Coyne was chosen as an artist-in-residence because she “brings really big, important, interesting questions that we thought would reach a really broad public.”
“The quality of her art is really remarkable. … You walk in that room going, ‘Whoa, this is compelling, it’s rich, the colors are totally saturated, the imagery is unique.’ We loved that,” she added.
It also helped that Levato Coyne had a preexisting familiarity with Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” and that she had a strong understanding of Renaissance art, which created “a nice feedback loop between Lauren’s artistic practice and her expertise and what we’re doing at the center as well,” Rubright said.
Though Medusa may not have gotten justice in her own story, Levato Coyne hopes to correct that, to prove that Medusa’s body is “not so easily disposable,” she said. She wants audiences to get “a sense of wonder” from her show, but she also wants them to be open to considering other versions of familiar narratives: “[History is] not stagnant, and we get one or two versions of the story, and maybe none of those versions are ever correct, or maybe they’re not the end of the story.”
After all, as she put it: “The past is not set in stone.”
Admission to “Medusa’s Bestiary: Embodiments & Ecologies” is free. The Kinney Center is open year-round from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday, except on all days that UMass Amherst is closed. For more information about Lauren Levato Coyne, visit laurenlevato.com.
