Biography

Throughout my career, I have tried to fuse a love for widespread artistic traditions with an activist temperament. Beginning in 1970, energized by my participation in the feminist art movement in Los Angeles and New York, I became a founding member of the Heresies publishing collective and an originating figure of the Pattern and Decoration movement. My colleagues and I were exploring the applied and decorative arts, especially visual cultures of the nonwestern world, as source and inspiration. We wanted to break down the high/low art hierarchies inherent in the West. As a result of these early discussions, my patterned paintings eventually moved off the canvas, evolving into installations composed of hand painted, glazed ceramic tiles and pieced silk wall hangings.

During the 1980s, I concentrated on ambitious public commissions, many in transportation centers, executed in ceramic tile and/or glass and marble mosaic, completing seventeen between 1983 and 2021. Out of a desire to communicate with a broader audience, these pieces have local and regional subject matter, sometimes ironically tweaked, sometimes catalogued as an almost archaeological enterprise. I have long rejected the academic disdain for visual opulence – in fact, my dissident political understanding could only be materialized through sensuous processing. Public art presents challenges of scale and context, but also of language and iconography. In the early twenty-first century, I had the opportunity to create pieces in Japan and Turkey, adapting their rich ornamental traditions to my contemporary collage aesthetic.

By the 1990s, maps had become the foundation for my private work, structures into which I could insert a range of issues, particularly the role of cartography in human knowledge. My map and globe works – frescoes, books, paintings, sculptures - which image both physical and mental terrain, employ mutations to raise geopolitical issues. Often their figurations are hybrids, places known only in the imagination, composed of memories and fragments. With an increasing urgency, and moving from earlier, visionary to modern charting as impetus, I seek the physical corollaries between mapping, naming, and subjugation.

During a year at the American Academy in Rome (1999-2000), I created Targets, a 9’ diameter walk-in globe, painted with aerial maps of all the places bombed by the US between 1945 and 2000. There is a disorienting echo inside, so that visitors’ voices are amplified, dramatizing my concern about the barbarity of aerial warfare and vulnerability of civilian populations. Several years later, I developed a large installation piece, Voyages, which included Targets, 65 carnival masks inscribed with maps, and hanging cartographic banners. Together, they examine the history of navigation and western expansion. Later, I worked with antique cosmological charts of the heavens and terrestrial maps of the earth, overlaid with galaxies and the tracks of satellites found on the Internet. Frightened of future wars in space, I am also drawn into its vast unknown, which today’s astronomers are charting.

In 2011-2012, I completed JEEZ, a 12’ x 12’ painting based on the Ebstorf map, a 13th - century circular mappa mundi. It depicted Biblical stories alongside pagan myths within a vision of the world as it was then known. Christ’s body served as a symbolic and literal frame. I drew upon a wide range of artistic practices, incorporating 125 images of Christ from worldwide sources. Archetypal figures accumulate, morphing from holy portraits into a rogue’s gallery of mismatched characters. Its companion, The Tempest, was completed in 2014, a 10’ x 10’ work based on a Chinese 18th century world map, in which the Great Wall traverses the upper levels and turbulent seas surround the land mass. Applied to the surface, there are collaged excerpts from more than 40 years of my own art, as well as 3D miniature globes (earrings, ashtrays, erasers, napkin holders, piggy banks, key chains, paper weights, pencil sharpeners, salt and pepper shakers, and yoyos). These two playful pieces together explore eastern and western systems for representing the world.

From 2013-2017, I brought together the various parts of my art, at first challenging myself to unite the patterns and maps by reinventing two 1977 artists’ books, If I Were a Botanist and If I Were an Astronomer: their pages were based on geometric Islamic star patterns, morphing and tessellating in and out of one another. I expanded them to mural scale, layered with outtakes from earlier projects. Their dense, saturated color and joyful aura disguise the embedded political content, visible on closer inspection. And then I discovered a cache of my childhood drawings at my parents’ home, created between ages 9-11, which escorted me much further back in time. I incorporated these drawings, many of which are cartographic, into paintings of early maps. From their different stages of life, the young girl and the adult woman began to shift back and forth within the pictorial space. Later, I began copying entire childhood drawings directly onto smaller canvases, creating enclosed, subsidiary works excerpted and reinterpreted from the first series. The worldview of my naïve schoolgirl pictures is that of early 1950s America, but my conventional grammar school innocence feels weirdly relevant to me - within our polarized society, where so many people hold onto fantasies about recovering an imaginary past.

In 2018, I began work on a General Services Administration commission for a new federal courthouse in Greenville, SC. There I saw Confederate flags proudly waving in graveyards and monuments to the rebel leaders. This triggered my Uncivil Wars series, which incorporates US Civil War battle maps - created by officers and soldiers from both the Confederate and Union armies - to depict a history that is currently still contested. Viruses erupt throughout the battle maps, reflecting the pandemic that locked down state, national, and international borders - and symbolizing the viral racism and xenophobia that permeate our country.  Meticulously copying the information held in each map, I turned them into expressive works by building up painterly surfaces with rich, saturated colors. While the viruses abound, my treatment evokes fireworks and vegetation, suggesting both the horrors and sadness of war, and the relief and jubilation of its ending. After completing these 13 paintings, I produced another 6, the Coda, based on other Civil War battles.  They have no viruses, but masks are sutured onto their surfaces, evoking the bandaged soldiers in nineteenth century sepia photographs.

My newest works, Collateral Damage, chart the sites of current wars and conflicts. Broad passages are filled with patterns from traditional decorative arts, objects of daily life that carry memories from one generation to the next, family treasures which are swept away by furious assaults and proxy wars. Although I luxuriate in the sheer beauty of maps, as incised diagram and reflection of our world. my co-existing social concerns, which have been with me from my beginnings as a young feminist artist, dictate how I create an art that strives to be both graphically satisfying and intellectually questioning.

Joyce Kozloff
September 2023

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