Collection: Joyce Kozloff

(b. 1942)

A key figure in the Pattern and Decoration and the Feminist Art movements of the 1970s, Joyce Kozloff is internationally recognized for her politically engaged paintings, installations and public works that explore her interests in history, decorative arts and non-Western visual culture. Beginning her career in the 1970s, she helped to found Heresies, a publishing collective that covered a range of feminist theory relative to art and politics. Simultaneously involved in the Pattern and decoration movement, Kozloff was interested in dissolving the high/low art hierarchies associated with the West vs. East dichotomy.

In the 1990s Kozloff began using maps in her work, considering the massive contribution cartography has made to our physical and mental understanding of the world. For her maps represented a structure through which she could touch on geopolitical issues of colonialism, subjugation, boundaries – cultural, imagined and real. At this time Kozloff was commissioned to complete a number of public projects, many of them in transportation centers, which pushed her work to a more ambitious scale. In 2000 after completing her year abroad for the Rome Prize with the American Academy in Rome, she created a series of nine-foot walk-in globe titled Targets. The interior spaces were sectioned into 24 parts that were then painted with maps of different locations that were bombed by the U.S. since WWII. Very much connected to her beginnings in feminism, Kozloff has always been interested in political and social power struggle that governs coexistence.  

Joyce Kozloff attended the Carnegie Institute of Technology during her undergraduate studies and received her M.F.A from Columbia University. She currently serves on the Board of Governors of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture since and is a member of the National Academy of Design.

SELECTED PUBLIC COLLECTIONS

Brooklyn Museum, NY

Jewish Museum, New York, NY

Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY

Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY