Joyce Kozloff, b. 1942, is an American artist commonly associated with the Pattern and Decoration movement of the 1970s - and with artists whose work is based on cartography since the early 1990s.
Joyce Kozloff, who was born in Somerville, New Jersey in 1942, received a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA in 1964 and an MFA from Columbia University in 1967. Kozloff was a co-founder [1] in both the Pattern and Decoration and the feminist art movement[2] of the 1970s and has been active in the women’s and peace movements throughout her life.
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Kozloff lived in Los Angeles, CA, 1970-71 with her husband, art critic Max Kozloff and young son Nikolas Kozloff. During that year, she joined forces with other women in the arts to form the Los Angeles Council of Women Artists, a group that organized the first protests about the lack of women included in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s exhibitions and collections.[1] Upon returning to New York, where she lives permanently, Kozloff continued to be active in the women artists’ movement. She was a founding member of the HERESIES collective in 1975, which produced a quarterly magazine about feminism, art and politics.[2]
Beginning in 1973, wishing to break down the western hierarchy between ‘high art’ and decoration, Kozloff created large paintings, drawing upon worldwide patterns, juxtaposing ornamental passages across an expansive field. In 1975, she began to meet with other artists Miriam Schapiro, Tony Robbin, Robert Zakanitch, Robert Kushner, Valerie Jaudon and others] pursuing related ideas; they formed the Pattern and Decoration movement. During the late 1970s, she produced An Interior Decorated, an installation composed of hanging silkscreen textile panels; hand painted, glazed tile pilasters; lithographs on Chinese silk paper; and a tiled floor composed of thousands of individually executed images on interlocking stars and hexagons. The project was redesigned for every space in which it was exhibited between 1979 and 1981. Just as her paintings had nonwestern origins, for this installation, she compiled a personal, visual anthology of the decorative arts from dozens of sources, including Caucasian kilims, Iznik and Catalan tiles, Seljuk brickwork, and Native American pottery.
To reach a broader audience, Kozloff produced fifteen public commissions between 1983 and 2003, most of which were executed in ceramic tile, or glass and marble mosaic. Each was based on local sources and references. Many of the early projects were for transportation centers, such as “Bay Area Victorian, Bay Area Deco, Bay Area Funk,” International Terminal, San Francisco Airport, 1983; “Homage to Frank Furness,” Wilmington, DE, Railroad Station, 1984; and “New England Decorative Arts,” Harvard Square Subway Station, Cambridge, MA, 1985. They began with an allover grid, which served as a scaffold for ornamental and playful elaborations. Later public works, which include “Caribbean Festival Arts,” I.S. 218, New York, NY, 1991; “The Movies: Fantasies and Spectacles,” Los Angeles Metro’s 7th and Flower Station, 1993; a floor piece for Chubu Cultural Center, Kurayoshi, Japan, 2001; and “Dreaming: The Passage of Time,” United States Consulate, Istanbul, Turkey, 2003, develop more complex scenarios and layers of meaning, juxtaposing moments of history across time.
Since the early 1990s, Kozloff has utilized mapping as a structure for her long-time passions - history, geography, popular arts and culture. She first painted cities she knew, onto which she laid patterns and images reflecting their colonial pasts [“Los Angeles Becoming Mexico City Becoming Los Angeles,” 1993], “Imperial Cities,” 1994]. Subsequently she examined the Baltic Sea [“Bodies of Water”], Mekong [“Mekong and memory”] and Amazon [“Calvino’s Cities on the Amazon”] rivers [1995-1997], contested and endangered bodies of water that resonate in our collective consciousness. In her series “Knowledge” [1998-1999], 65 small (8 x 10”) frescoes and 6 tabletop globes, she depicted the inaccuracies of maps from earlier times, particularly during the “Age of Discovery,” to reveal the arbitrary nature of what can be known. In 1999-2000, during Kozloff’s year-long fellowship at the American Academy in Rome, she executed “Targets,” a nine-foot walk-in globe in twenty-four sections, each painted with an aerial map of a site was bombed by the US between the years 1945 and 2000. Upon entering, the visitor is completely surrounded, and if he/she speaks, there is an echo amplified by the enclosed space. Two multi-panel, 16’ long works followed, each in the form of the flattened gores of a globe [2002]: “Spheres of Influence” [Kozloff’s “terrestrial piece”] and “Dark and Light Continents” [her “celestial piece”].
For several years, Joyce Kozloff worked on a huge installation about the history of western colonialism, shown at Thetis in the Venice Arsenale [2006], “Voyages + Targets.” She painted islands across the world on 64 Venetian Carnival masks situated inside windows with light streaming through their eyes; hanging from the ceiling and along the brick walls, there were banners [“Voyages: Carnevale,” “Voyages: Maui” and “Voyages: Kaho’olawe”] with maps of islands in the Pacific and jazzy Carnival imagery as it has morphed around the planet. Beginning in 2006, Kozloff’s ongoing tondi [round paintings] began with Renaissance cosmological charts, crisscrossed by the tracks of satellites in space, an imaginary projection of future (star) wars [“the days and hours and moments of our lives,” “Helium on the Moon,” “Revolver”]. They were followed by a massive triptych, “The Middle East: Three Views” [2010], a projection of the contested areas in that region during the Roman era, the Cold War, and currently.
Kozloff has been awarded numerous grants, residencies and honors, including National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artist grants in Painting [1977] and Drawings, Prints and Artists’ Books [1985]. She received a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio fellowship [1992] and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship [2004]. Honors include an Alumni Award, Carnegie Mellon University [2005], a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Women’s Caucus for Art, College Art Association [2009], and an ArtTable Artist Honor [2011].
In the late 1980s she produced a series of 32 watercolors entitled Patterns of Desire—Pornament is Crime, published by Hudson Hills Press in 1990 with an introductory essay by Linda Nochlin. This book by a feminist artist juxtaposed the obsessive nature of both decoration and pornography in many traditions, to comic and revelatory effect. A founding member of the New York activist group, Artists Against the War [2003], Kozloff has been increasingly preoccupied with that theme. In 2001, she began "Boy's Art,” a series of twenty-four drawings based on maps, diagrams, and illustrations of historic battles, over which she collaged copies of her son Nikolas’s childhood war drawings and details from old master paintings. An oversized artist’s book of these works was published by D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers in 2003 with an introductory essay by Robert Kushner. In 2010, Charta Books Ltd. published Kozloff’s third artist’s book, “China is Near,” which includes a conversation with Barbara Pollack. For this publication, the artist photographed the China most accessible to her, New York’s Chinatown, a few blocks from her home, as well as other Chinatowns within range. She copied old charts of the Silk Road and downloaded online maps of all the places in the world called “China”. It’s a bright, glossy mash-up of contemporary kitsch and historic commerce, a guide to the global highway.
Kozloff had solo exhibitions at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York, NY, in 1970, 1971, 1973, 1974, 1976, 1977, and 1981. Other early solo exhibitions included “Projects and Proposals” [1982] and “Architectural Caprices” [1985] at the Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York, NY; “Investigations 4: Joyce Kozloff,” Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA [1983]; and “Joyce Kozloff Mural for Harvard Square Subway Station: New England Decorative Arts,” P.S. 1, Long Island City, NY [1984]. “Visionary Ornament,” Boston University Art Gallery, Boston, MA, traveled to 4 other museums [1986-1987], and “Patterns of Desire,” Lorence Monk Gallery, New York, NY, traveled to 5 additional venues [1990-1993].“Mapping: Public and Private,” was shown at the Midtown Payson Gallery, New York, NY [1995]. “Crossed Purposes,” a traveling exhibition pairing her work with that of her husband, photographer Max Kozloff, was organized by the Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, OH and traveled to 9 other museums and university galleries in the US from 1998 to 2000. Kozloff has been exhibiting at the DC Moore Gallery since 1997: “Other People’s Fantasies: maps, movies and menus” [1997]; “Knowledge: an ongoing fresco project by Joyce Kozloff” [1999]; “Targets” [2001]; “Boys’ Art and other works” [2003]; “Voyages” [2007]; and “Navigational Triangles” [2010]. Other important exhibitions of the artist’s cartographic art were “Joyce Kozloff: Topographies,” Contemporary Art Center of Virginia, Virginia Beach, VA [2002]; “Joyce Kozloff: Exterior and Interior Cartographies,” Regina Gouger Miller Gallery, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA [2006]; “Voyages + Targets,” Thetis, Arsenale, Venice, IT [2006] and “Joyce Kozloff: Co+Ordinates,” Trout Gallery, Dickinson College, Carlisle, PA [2008].
Joyce Kozloff has been included in countless group shows including: “Painting Annual,” Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY [1972]; “GEDOK American Woman Artist Show,” Kunsthaus, Hamburg, DE [1972]; “Women Choose Women,” New York Cultural Center, New York, NY [1973]; “Pattern Painting,” P. S. 1, Long Island City, NY [1977]; “Arabesque,” Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, OH [1978]; “The Decorative Impulse,” Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA [1979]; “Whitney Biennial,” Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY [1979]; “Contemporary Feminist Art,” Haags Gemeneentemuseum, The Hague, NL [1979]; “Patterning Painting,” Palais des Beaux Arts, Brussels, BE [1979]; “Drawings: The Pluralist Decade,” 39th Venice Biennale, American Pavilion, Venice, IT [1980]; “Printed Art: A View of Two Decades,” Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY [1980]; “Contemporary American Prints and Drawings,” National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC [1981]; “Ornamentalism: The New Decorativeness in Architecture and Design,” Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, NY [1982]; “After Matisse,” Queens Museum, Flushing, NY [1985]; “A Graphic Muse, Prints by Contemporary Women Artists,” Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, South Hadley, MA [1987]; “Making Their Mark: Women Artists Today, A Documentary Survey 1970-1985,” Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, OH [1988]; “Architectural Art: Affirming the Design Relationship,” American Craft Museum, New York, NY [1988]; “Division of Labor: Women’s Work in Contemporary Art,” Bronx Museum of Art, Bronx, NY [1995]; World Views: Maps & Art,” Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN [1999]; “The American Century: Art & Culture, 1900-2000,” Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY [1999], “First International Art Biennial – Buenos Ares: The Globalization of Urban Culture,” National Museum of Fine Arts, Buenos Aires, AR [2000], “Patterns: Between Object and Arabesque,” Kunsthallen Brandts Klaedefabrik, Odense, DK [2001]; “The World According to the Newest and Most Exact Observations: Mapping Art and Science,” Tang Museum, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY [2001]; “Personal and Political: Feminist Artists and the Women’s Movement, 1969-1975,” Guild Hall, East Hampton, NY [2002]; “How American Women Artists Invented Postmodernism: 1970-1975,” Mason Gross Arts Galleries, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ [2005]; “WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution,” The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, Los Angeles, CA [2006]; “Pattern and Decoration: An Ideal Vision in American Art, 1975-85,” Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, NY [2007]; “Claiming Space: The American Feminist Originators,” Katzen Art Center, American University Museum, Washington, DC [2007];“HereThereEverywhere,” Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago, IL [2008]; “Shifting the Gaze: Painting and Feminism,” The Jewish Museum, New York, NY [2010].
Kozloff is represented by DC Moore Gallery, New York, NY. Her art is in numerous museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY: Jewish Museum, New York, NY; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; National Museum of American Art, Washington, DC; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC; Library of Congress, Washington, DC; Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, IN; Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe, NM; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Yale University Art Museum, New Haven, CT; Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA; National Academy of Design, NY; Neue Galerie Sammlung Ludwig, Aachen, Germany; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; and M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, San Francisco, CA.
For a complete bibliography, see www.joycekozloff.net