Joyce Kozloff

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 "" 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 parents' families had emigrated from Lithuania. She had two younger brothers.
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.
She was married to Max Kozloff on July 2, 1967 at her parents' home in Bound Brook, New Jersey by her family's Orthodox rabbi, although she and Max are not religious. They have one son. 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.
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. 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.
In the summer of 1973 Kozloff lived in Mexico. In 1975 she visited Morocco and three years later she visited Turkey. She has traveled widely ever since. During her visits she studies the countries' "decorative traditions" and the cultural significance of ornament there. When Kozloff first realized, in the early 1970s, 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. She is the co-author, with Valerie Jaudon, of the widely anthologized "Art Hysterical Notions of Progress and Culture" (1978), in which she and Jaudon explained how they thought sexist and racist assumptions underlaid Western art history discourse. They reasserted the value of ornamentation and aesthetic beauty - qualities assigned to the feminine sphere.
Kozloff was mentored and inspired by Miriam Schapiro, Nancy Spero, Ida Applebroog and May Stevens.
Kozloff was interviewed for the film "!Women Art Revolution".
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. 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. ""An Interior Decorated" is where painting meets architecture, where art meets craft, where personal commitment meets public art", wrote Carrie Rickey, art critic.
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". 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. The works were often collaborative efforts, involving input from the public, community boards, architects, and arts patrons.
Kozloff created 16 public art projects, including:
She was interested in public art because it makes art accessible to everyone, and not just the public and private collectors, 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.
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. 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. 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.
Map themes.
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 in diameter made of 24 gore-shaped sections. She painted an aerial map on
the inside surface of each section to depict 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 makes a sound there is an echo amplified by the enclosed space. Two multi-panel, -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, 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 -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.
Collections.
Her art is in numerous museum collections, including:
Exhibitions.
Kozloff has had group and solo exhibitions since 1970 in many US cities, including New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Washington, DC 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. International exhibitions include Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Argentina, and Denmark.
Most recently, Kozloff's work has been included in several national and international museum exhibitions focusing on the Pattern and Decoration movement: "With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972-1985", Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA (2019-2020); "Less is a Bore: Maximalist Art &amp; Design", Institute for Contemporary Art, Boston, MA (2019); "Pattern and Decoration: Ornament as Promise", Ludwig Forum, Aachen, Germany, Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Vienna, Austria, and Ludwig Museum, Budapest, Hungary (2018-2019); "Pattern, Decoration &amp; Crime", MAMCO, Geneva, Switzerland, and Le Consortium, Dijon, France (2018-2019).
Kozloff is represented by DC Moore Gallery in New York City and has been exhibiting there since 1997.