Joyce Kozloff is an American artist, painter and muralist whose artworks are related to cartography. She is also known for her engagement in peace and feminist art movements.
Background
Ethnicity:
The ancestors of Joyce Kozloff’s parents came to the United States from Lithuania.
Joyce Kozloff was born on December 14, 1942, in Somerville, New Jersey, United States. She is a daughter of Adele Rosenberg and Leonard Blumberg, an attorney.
Joyce’s mother was a homemaker and an active member of the community organizations.
The artist has two younger brothers whose names are Bruce and Allen.
Joyce revealed her passion early in the childhood and produced her first drawings at the age of nine.
Education
Joyce Kozloff began her artistic education in 1959 when she attended the summer classes of the Art Students League in New York City. Three years later, also in the summer, she took some art lessons at the Rutgers University and at the University of Florence in Italy (Università di Firenze) the following summer.
Later, Kozloff enrolled at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (currently Carnegie Mellon University) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania where in 1964 she obtained her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. Then, the young artist pursued her training at the Columbia University in New York City which provided her with a Master of Fine Arts degree three years later.
In 2015, Joyce Kozloff received the Doctor of Fine Arts degree at the Carnegie Mellon University and a year later the Doctor of Visual Arts degree from the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts in Portland, Maine.
Since the beginning of her artistic career in the early 1970s, Joyce Kozloff combined her passion for art traditions with the social activity. The debut solo exhibition of the artist was organized in 1970 at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York City.
A year later, she became a member of the Los Angeles Council of Women Artists, an association aimed to defend the rights of women in art.
The artistic mind of Kozloff during this period was influenced by the decorative and pattern culture of Mexico, Morocco, Egypt and Turkey. The passion increased during her trip to Mexico in the summer of 1970 when she explored the Pre-Columbian folk art. These investigations resulted in the series of large-scale acrylic abstract paintings full of patterns which she presented at her next solo show at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in 1974. Since then, Kozloff’s trips became regular.
In 1975, the artist joined her colleagues fascinated by the pattern design and together they organized the Pattern and Decoration movement.
Despite her involvement in the social life and her painting activity, the artist found the time to transmit her knowledge to the students. So, in 1972 Kozloff began to teach at the Queens College of the City University of New York. She had held the post till 1973. A year later, she joined the professor’s stuff of the School of Visual Arts of New York City and spent there one year too. In 1975, Kozloff gave art lessons at the Art Institute of Chicago. At the end of the decade, she also worked at such educational institutions as the Syracuse University, University of New Mexico and The Brooklyn Museum Art School.
By 1979, Joyce Kozloff left her pattern art and concentrated on the public commissions, often from the transportation centres, made in ceramic tile or glass and marble mosaic, like her ‘Interior Decorated’ presented at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in 1979. The debut public mural became New England Decorative Arts made for the Harvard Square Subway Station in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In total, she had worked on fifteen major public art commissions till 2003.
In 1986, Joyce Kozloff gave art lessons at the Washington University in Saint Louis and continued the teaching activity throughout the 1990s and 2000s serving at many educational institutions in the United States and abroad, like the Cooper Union in New York City (1990), the Vermont College of Norwich University in Montpelier, Vermont (1994- 2000), the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine (1998), the Terra Foundation for American Art in Giverny, France (2005), the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore (2008-2009 as an Interim Director of the Hoffberger Graduate Painting Program) and the Art New England Summer Workshops in Bennington (2013).
The new subject which inspired Kozloff’s frescoes, books, paintings, and sculptures of the early 1990s was mapping. Due to the cartography, she managed to unite her passion for history, culture, the decorative and popular arts in her artworks. Firstly, Joyce began from the cities known to her by reflecting its colonial past, like in Mexico City Becoming Los Angeles (1993) and Imperial Cities (1994). Then, the artist’s paintings showed the bodies of water and the incorrectness of early maps made at the “Age of Discovery.”
In 1999, Joyce Kozloff obtained the Jules Guerin Fellowship which allowed her to spent one year at the American Academy in Rome where she worked on her next project related to maps called ‘Targets’. It represents a nine-foot walk-in globe in twenty-four sections. On each section, Kozloff reproduced in a form of an aerial map the areas bombed by the United States after the World War II. Then followed such mapping series as Boy's Art, Spheres of Influence, Dark and Light Continents, JEEZ, The Tempest.
Since 2013, Kozloff returned to her pattern art trying to unite it with her passion for maps. She used her childhood cartography drawings and doll collections as the elements of the artworks.
Except for the above-mentioned exhibitions, Joyce Kozloff’s artworks and installations were admired by the public around the United States and the whole world, including such countries as Italy, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Argentina, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Mexico, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Japan.
Among 2018 solo exhibitions are the shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Ludwig Forum for International Art in Aachen, Germany and the Museum of Contemporary Art (MAMCO) in Geneva, France.
Since 1997, Joyce Kozloff’s art has been represented by DC Moore Gallery in New York City.
Pornament is Crime #8: Weenie Waving for the Elephant
Matisse at the Green Mosque, Bursa
A Maze
To Vuillard (Red and Green)
Smut Dynasty Vase (Pornament is Crime Series)
Knowledge #49: The World, 1581
Medersa El-Attarin, Fez, with Secession Trees and Water
Calvino’s Cities on the Amazon
Knowledge #66: Western Europe, late 16th century
Magic Carpet Ride
Longing
The Spanish Were Here
Lattice
Proposal for Prudential Lobby/Newark
Mad Russian Blanket
Public Pool for Daytime Swimming
Art Historian’s Joke: Egyptian Woman
Religion
Joyce Kozloff isn't a religious person, but she considers herself as culturally and socially engaged Jew.
Politics
Joyce Kozloff has been an active women’s rights campaigner in the art field and a social activist in peace movements.
Views
Joyce Kozloff believes that the artist must be involved in the public culture to change something in it.
Quotations:
"At its best, decoration is the coming together of painting, sculpture, architecture and the applied arts. Decoration humanizes our living and working spaces. It connects with ancient, worldwide traditions and crafts."
"Decoration abolishes hierarchical distinctions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art. It is not elitist and does not condescend: it will expand our notion of ‘the artist’ and the ‘art audience."
"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."
"The feminist revelation – that the decorative arts were largely created by anonymous women and people of color, and therefore degraded in the eyes of historians and critics – forever changed my thinking."
Membership
Los Angeles Council of Women Artists
,
United States
1971
Public Art Fund
,
United States
1984 - 1986
Carnegie Mellon University Department of Art Advisory Board
,
United States
1992 - 1998
Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture
,
United States
1998 - 2012
National Academy of Design
,
United States
2002
Advisory Committee of the Archives of American Art
,
United States
2013
Interests
history, culture, decorative and popular arts
Artists
Miriam Schapiro, Nancy Spero, Ida Applebroog
Connections
Joyce Kozloff married a photographer and art historian Max Kozloff on July 2, 1967. The family produced one child, a boy named Nikolas who was born on March 26, 1969. Nowadays, he is a historian.