Joyce Kozloff

Joyce Kozloff
Born Joyce Blumberg
December 14, 1942
Somerville, New Jersey
Alma mater Carnegie Mellon University
Columbia University
Known for Painting
Movement Pattern and Decoration
Feminist art movement
Spouse(s) Max Kozloff
Website
joycekozloff.net

Joyce Kozloff (born 1942) is an American artist whose politically engaged work has been based on cartography since the early 1990s.

Kozloff was one of the original members of the Pattern and Decoration movement and was an early artist in the 1970s feminist art movements. She has been active in the women's and peace movements throughout her life. She was also a founding member of the Heresies collective.

Personal life and education

Joyce Blumberg was born to Adele Rosenberg and Leonard Blumberg on December 14, 1942 in Somerville, New Jersey. Leonard, born in New Jersey, was an attorney. Adele was active in community organizations. Both of her parent's families had emigrated from Lithuania. She had two younger brothers, Bruce and Allen.[1]

During the summer of 1959, Joyce studied art at New York's Art Students League. In the summer of 1962 she attended Rutgers University and the following summer she attended the Università di Firenze. In 1964 she earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Carnegie Institute of Technology. She then attended Columbia University and received a Masters of Fine Arts in 1967.[1][2]

She was married to Max Kozloff on July 2, 1967 at her parent's home in Bound Brook, New Jersey by her family's Orthodox rabbi, although she and Max are not religious. Max, born on June 21, 1933 in Chicago is an art and photography critic and a photographer. Nikolas Kozloff, their son, who is a writer, was born in New York in 1969.[1] Kozloff has lived in New York since 1964 except for a year in Los Angeles, California (1970-1971) and a year in Rome, Italy (1999-2000).

Career

Feminist art movement

For us, there weren’t women in the galleries and museums, so we formed our own galleries, we curated our own exhibitions, we formed our own publications, we mentored one another, we even formed schools for feminist art. We examined the content of the history of art, and we began to make different kinds of art forms based on our experiences as women. So it was both social and something even beyond; in our case, it came back into our own studios.[3]

“
”
Joyce Kozloff

She joined with other women in the arts in 1971 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.[4][5] Upon returning to New York, Kozloff continued to be active in the women artists’ movement. She joined the Ad Hoc Committee of Women Artists and was a founding member of the Heresies Collective in 1975, which produced a quarterly magazine about feminism, art and politics.[6]

In the summer of 1973 Kozloff lived in Mexico, in 1975 she visited Morocco and three years later, visited Turkey. She has traveled widely ever since. During her visits she studies their "decorative traditions" and the cultural significance of ornament. When Kozloff first realized, in the early 70s, that the decorative arts were the domain of women and non-western artists, she understood that the hierarchy among the arts had privileged the production of European and American men. This fueled her position as a feminist and inspired her interest in pattern design.[1]

Kozloff was mentored and inspired by Miriam Schapiro, Nancy Spero, Ida Applebroog and May Stevens.[3]

Pattern and Decoration

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 artists Miriam Schapiro, Tony Robbin, Robert Zakanitch, Robert Kushner, Valerie Jaudon and others pursuing related ideas; they formed the Pattern and Decoration movement.[7] 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 in 1979 and 1980. 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, İznik and Catalan tiles, Seljuk brickwork, and Native American pottery.[1][7][8] "An Interior Decorated is where painting meets architecture, where art meets craft, where personal commitment meets public art," wrote Carrie Rickey, art critic.[1]

Three Portals...pink triangle

[9]

Public art

Kozloff became interested in public art when studying under Robert Lepper at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh. He taught the Oakland Project, in which students went out into the Oakland neighborhood and made art documenting the infrastructure, buildings and people. She said, "That was my initiation into public art -- into the world outside."[10] The mural in the Harvard Square subway station, Cambridge, MA, her first public artwork, was obtained through a competition. Most of the rest of her public projects were directly commissioned. Her initial large scale pieces were composed of interlocking patterns of glass mosaic and/or ceramic tiles, an extension of her earlier gallery art. She began incorporating images from the cities' histories, so as to make the works site specific. For instance, at the Suburban Station in Philadelphia, she substituted an image of William Penn for the Good Shepherd in an appropriation of the famous Byzantine Tomb of Galla Placidia in Ravenna, Italy.[11] The works were often collaborative efforts, involving input from the public, community boards, architects, and arts patrons.[12]

Kozloff created 16 public art projects,[11] including:

  • 1983 - Bay Area Victorian, Bay Area Deco, Bay Area Funk, at San Francisco Airport's International Terminal[3][13]
  • 1984 - an homage to Frank Furness at Wilmington Station in Delaware[3][14]
  • 1984 - Humboldt-Hospital Subway Station, Buffalo, New York.[1][15]
  • 1985 - New England Decorative Arts, her first public mural, at Harvard Square subway station in Cambridge.[1]
  • 1985 - One Penn Center, Suburban Train Station, her first completely mosaic work, in Philadelphia[1][11]
  • 1987 - "D" for Detroit, Financial District Station: Detroit People Mover elevated rail system, Michigan[1][16]
  • 1989 - Underwater Landscapes, Home Savings of America, Atrium, Irwindale, California[17][18]
  • 1989 - Gardens at Villandry with Angels for Los Angeles and Gardens at Villandry and Chenonceaux with Orange Festoons for Los Angeles, Home Savings of America Tower, Community Redevelopment Agency of the City of Los Angeles[19]
  • 1990 - Pasadena, the City of Roses, Plaza las Fuentes, Pasadena, California[17]
  • 1991 - Caribbean Festival Arts, Public School 218, New York City[20]
  • 1992 - Member, Open Space Design Team, Riverside South Corporation, New York[21]
  • 1993 - The Movies: Fantasies and Spectacles, Los Angeles Metro’s 7th and Flower Station[3][22]
  • 1995 - Around the World on the 44th Parallel, Memorial Library, Mankato State University[21]
  • 1997 - Four cartographic representations based on ancient charts of the Chesapeake Bay area, Reagan National Airport, Washington, D.C. It is a marble mosaic.[3][23]
  • 2001 - a floor piece for Chubu Cultural Center, Kurayoshi, Japan[24]
  • 2002 - Florida Revisited, Fairway Office Center, West Palm Beach, Florida.[25]
  • 2003 - Dreaming: The Passage of Time, United States Consulate, Istanbul, Turkey.[26]

She was interested in public art because it makes art accessible to everyone, and not just the public and private collectors,[1] but became disheartened after the 1990s political "culture wars," felt that she'd have to censor her creative expression to create acceptable "safe art", and discontinued vying for public art commissions.[21]

Artist's books

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.[27] 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 illustrations, diagrams, and maps depicting historic battles, over which she collaged copies of her son Nikolas’s childhood war drawings and details from old master paintings.[28] 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.[29]

Map theme

Descartes' Heart (2008) by Joyce Kozloff

Kozloff has utilized mapping since the early 1990s as a structure for her long-time passions - history, geography, popular arts and culture. In Los Angeles Becoming Mexico City Becoming Los Angeles (1993) and Imperial Cities (1994) she painted cities she knew, overlaying images and patterns reflective of their colonial pasts. She subsequently examined bodies of water such as the Baltic Sea in Bodies of Water, the Mekong and Amazon Rivers in Mekong and memory and Calvino’s Cities on the Amazon (1995–1997). In her series Knowledge (1998–1999), consisting of 65 small (8 x 10") frescoes and six 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 walk-in globe nine feet in diameter with twenty-four sections. She painted an aerial map on each section that depicted a site bombed by the United States military 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).

Voyages, masks

For several years, 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]. "Descartes' Heart" is based on the heart-shaped map, "Cosmographia universalis ab Orontio olin descripta," by Renaissance cartographer, Giovanni Cimerlino, Verona, 1566. On the top is a totally wacky map called "Mechanical Universe" by Descartes, 1644. The "tondi" were followed by an 18' long 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. The maps, based on photographs taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, float in deep space among the stars, as if they had been dislodged from the earth.

Awards and honors

Kozloff has been awarded numerous awards grants and residencies, including:

[31]

In 2002 she was elected into the National Academy of Design.[33]

Collections

Her art is in numerous museum collections, including:

Exhibitions

Kozloff has had group and solo exhibitions since 1970 in many U.S. cities, including New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Washington, D.C.[34][35][36][37] She had a traveling exhibition with her husband Max, "Crossed Purposes", that started in Youngstown, Ohio and traveled to eight other museums and university galleries in the US from 1998 to 2000.[36][38] International exhibitions include Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Argentina, and Denmark.[37]

Kozloff is represented by DC Moore Gallery in New York City and has been exhibiting there since 1997.[36][39]

Publications

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 1.8 1.9 1.10 1.11 1.12 1.13 1.14 1.15 1.16 1.17 1.18 1.19 1.20 Meeker, Carlene. "Joyce Kozloff". Jewish Women's Archive. Retrieved January 16, 2014.
  2. ↑ Moriuchi, Mey-Yen (2012). "Joyce Kozloff (American b. 1942)". The Female Gaze: Women Artists Making Their World. New York: Hudson Hills. p. 282. ISBN 978-1-55595-389-8.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 "Where Fine Art Meets Craft: The Accessible Works of Joyce Kozloff". American Association of University Women. August 28, 2013.
  4. ↑ Wilding, Faith (1977). By Our Own Hands. Santa Monica, CA: Double X. p. 17.
  5. ↑ Corinne Robins, The Pluralist Era: American Art, 1968-1981. New York: Harper & Row, 1984. p. 140.
  6. ↑ Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, ed. (1994). The Power of Feminist Art. New York: Harry N. Abrams. p. 126.
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 Nancy Princenthal; Phillip Earenfight. Joyce Kozloff: Co+ordinates. The Trout Gallery-Dickinson; 2008. ISBN 978-0-9768488-8-2. p. 30-32, 45- 46.
  8. ↑ Delia Gaze. Concise Dictionary of Women Artists. Taylor & Francis; January 2001. ISBN 978-1-57958-335-4. p. 427.
  9. ↑ http://www.joycekozloff.net and www.dcmoore.com
  10. ↑ Nancy Princenthal; Phillip Earenfight. Joyce Kozloff: Co+ordinates. The Trout Gallery-Dickinson; 2008. ISBN 978-0-9768488-8-2. p. 44.
  11. ↑ 11.0 11.1 11.2 Nancy Princenthal; Phillip Earenfight. Joyce Kozloff: Co+ordinates. The Trout Gallery-Dickinson; 2008. ISBN 978-0-9768488-8-2. p. 48.
  12. ↑ Nancy Princenthal; Phillip Earenfight. Joyce Kozloff: Co+ordinates. The Trout Gallery-Dickinson; 2008. ISBN 978-0-9768488-8-2. p. 32.
  13. ↑ A Mosaic of Bay Area History. Art and Architecture - San Francisco. Retrieved January 17, 2014.
  14. ↑ Anne Swartz. Pattern and Decoration: An Ideal Vision in American Art, 1975-1985. Hudson River Museum; 2007. ISBN 978-0-943651-35-4. p. 79.
  15. ↑ Danto, Arthur Coleman (2001). The Madonna of the future: essays in a pluralistic art world. University of California Press. p. 45. ISBN 978-0-520-23002-6.
  16. ↑ Financial District. The Detroit People Mover. Retrieved January 17, 2014.
  17. ↑ 17.0 17.1 Joyce Kozloff biography. Public Art in L.A. Retrieved January 17, 2014.
  18. ↑ Joyce Kozloff. World's Women On-Line!. Retrieved January 17, 2014.
  19. ↑ Gardens of Villandry and Gardens at Chenonceaux. Public Art in L.A. Retrieved January 17, 2014.
  20. ↑ Joyce Kozloff Lecture - June 16, 2010 . Los Angeles Events. Eventful. Retrieved January 17, 2014.
  21. ↑ 21.0 21.1 21.2 Nancy Princenthal; Phillip Earenfight. Joyce Kozloff: Co+ordinates. The Trout Gallery-Dickinson; 2008. ISBN 978-0-9768488-8-2. p. 32–33.
  22. ↑ Gloria Gerace; Dennis Keeley; Margie J. Reese. Urban surprises: a guide to public art in Los Angeles. City of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Dept.; 1 July 2002. ISBN 978-1-890449-14-8. p. 77.
  23. ↑ Public Art Photo Gallery. Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority: Reagan National Airport. Retrieved January 17, 2014.
  24. ↑ Nancy Princenthal; Phillip Earenfight. Joyce Kozloff: Co+ordinates. The Trout Gallery-Dickinson; 2008. ISBN 978-0-9768488-8-2. pp. 56, 129.
  25. ↑ Joyce Kozloff biography. DC Moore. Retrieved January 17, 2014.
  26. ↑ Joyce Kozloff: Dreaming the Passage of Time, I, II, III. U.S. Department of State. Retrieved January 17, 2014.
  27. ↑ Kozloff, Joyce. Patterns of Desire. Introduction by Linda Nochlin. New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1990.
  28. ↑ Wood, Denis (2012). "Map Art: Stripping the Mask from the Map". Rethinking the Power of Maps. Guilford Press. pp. 189–190. ISBN 978-1-60623-708-3.
  29. ↑ Kozloff, Joyce, and Barbara Pollack. Joyce Kozloff: China Is near. Milano: Charta, 2010. Print.
  30. ↑ Carnegie Mellon Alumni Awards on October 28 Celebrate Centennial Year for College of Fine Arts Carnegie Mellon University. October 19, 2005. Retrieved January 17, 2014.
  31. ↑ Women's Caucus for Art Honors MICA Graduate Faculty Maren Hassinger, Joyce Kozloff for Lifetime Achievement. Maryland Institute College of Art. February 24, 2009. Retrieved January 17, 2014.
  32. ↑ ArtTable Honors Influential Women in the Visual Arts. Project Row Houses. Retrieved January 17, 2014.
  33. ↑ Joyce Kozloff. National Academy of Design. Retrieved January 17, 2014. Note: determined that she became part of the Academy in 2002 by the "NA 2002" after her name.
  34. ↑ Swartz, Anne (2007). Pattern and Decoration: An Ideal Vision in American Art, 1975-1985. Yonkers, N.Y.: Hudson River Museum. pp. 31–32; 77–83. ISBN 978-0-943651-35-4.
  35. ↑ Renn, Melissa (2006). "Max Kozloff". Encyclopedia of Twentieth-century Photography. New York: Routledge. pp. 889–890. ISBN 978-0-415-97665-7.
  36. ↑ 36.0 36.1 36.2 Glueck, Grace (December 5, 2003). "Art in Review: Joyce Kozloff - 'Boys' Art and Other Works'". The New York Times.
  37. ↑ 37.0 37.1 Nancy Princenthal; Phillip Earenfight. Joyce Kozloff: Co+ordinates. The Trout Gallery-Dickinson; 2008. ISBN 978-0-9768488-8-2. p. 114–119.
  38. ↑ Moira Roth. "Crossed Purposes: Joyce & Max Kozloff", exhibition catalogue. Youngstown, OH: The Butler Institute of American Art, 1998.
  39. ↑ "DC Moore Gallery artist page". Retrieved 1 February 2013.

Further reading

Books and exhibition catalogs
Articles, essays and reviews

Magazine, col.7 issue 3, January–February 2013.

Websites
Interviews

External links