Joyce Kozloff (born December 14, 1942) is an American artist known for her paintings, murals, and public art installations. She was one of the original members of the Pattern and Decoration movement and an early artist in the 1970s feminist art movement, including as a founding member of the Heresies collective and (revealed in 2026) of Guerrilla Girls as Liubov Popova.
She has been active in the women's and peace movements throughout her life. Since the early 1990s, her work has drawn extensively on cartography and patterns.
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, she 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 married Max Kozloff on July 2, 1967. They have a son. Kozloff has lived primarily in New York since 1964. Their marriage lasted until Max's death in 2025.
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.Corinne Robins, . New York: Harper & Row, 1984. p. 140. 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 the quarterly magazine Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics.
In the summer of 1973 Kozloff lived in Mexico. She visited Morocco in 1975 and Turkey in 1978. During her visits she studied the countries' decorative traditions and ornaments. In the 1970s, she observed that the decorative arts were the domain of women and non-western artists, and wrote that the hierarchy among the arts had privileged the production of European and American men, fueling her position as a feminist and inspired her interest in pattern design. With Valerie Jaudon, she co-authored the widely anthologized "Art Hysterical Notions of Progress and Culture" (1978), in which they 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.Stiles, Kristine and Peter Selz (1996). Theories and Document of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists' Writings. Berkeley and Los Angeles California: University of California Press. . pp. 154–155
Kozloff was mentored and inspired by Miriam Schapiro, Nancy Spero, Ida Applebroog and May Stevens. She 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.Nancy Princenthal; Phillip Earenfight. Joyce Kozloff: Co+ordinates. The Trout Gallery-Dickinson; 2008. . p. 30-34, 45- 46.
During the late 1970s, she produced An Interior Decorated, a travelling 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.Delia Gaze. Concise Dictionary of Women Artists. Taylor & Francis; January 2001. . p. 427. Critic Carrie Rickey wrote that the installation was "where painting meets architecture, where art meets craft, where personal commitment meets public art".
Public art Kozloff became interested in public art while studying under Robert Lepper at Carnegie Mellon. 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".Nancy Princenthal; Phillip Earenfight. Joyce Kozloff: Co+ordinates. The Trout Gallery-Dickinson; 2008. . p. 44. One of her first works of public art, a mural in the Harvard Square subway station in Cambridge, was the result of a competition. Most of her other 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 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 Byzantine Tomb of Galla Placidia in Ravenna.Nancy Princenthal; Phillip Earenfight. Joyce Kozloff: Co+ordinates. The Trout Gallery-Dickinson; 2008. . p. 48. Her public works were often collaborations, with input from the public, community boards, architects, and arts patrons.Nancy Princenthal; Phillip Earenfight. Joyce Kozloff: Co+ordinates. The Trout Gallery-Dickinson; 2008. . p. 32.
Kozloff created 16 public art projects, including:
1983 - Bay Area Victorian, Bay Area Deco, Bay Area Funk, at San Francisco Airport's International TerminalA Mosaic of Bay Area History. Art and Architecture - San Francisco. Retrieved January 17, 2014. 1984 - an homage to Frank Furness at Wilmington Station in DelawareAnne Swartz. Pattern and Decoration: An Ideal Vision in American Art, 1975-1985. Hudson River Museum; 2007. . p. 79. 1984 - Humboldt-Hospital Buffalo Metro Rail, Buffalo, New York. 1985 - New England Decorative Arts, her first public mural, at Harvard Square subway station in Cambridge. 1985 - One Penn Center, Suburban Train Station, her first completely mosaic work, in Philadelphia 1987 - "D" for Detroit, Financial District Station: Detroit People Mover elevated rail system, MichiganFinancial District. The Detroit People Mover. Retrieved January 17, 2014. 1990 - Pasadena, the City of Roses, Plaza las Fuentes, Pasadena, California Public Art in L.A. Retrieved January 17, 2014. 1991 - Caribbean Festival Arts, Public School 218, New York CityJoyce Kozloff Lecture - June 16, 2010 . Los Angeles Events. Eventful. Retrieved January 17, 2014. 1993 - The Movies: Fantasies and Spectacles, Los Angeles Metro’s 7th and Flower StationGloria 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. . p. 77. 1995 - Around the World on the 44th Parallel, Memorial Library, Mankato State UniversityNancy Princenthal; Phillip Earenfight. Joyce Kozloff: Co+ordinates. The Trout Gallery-Dickinson; 2008. . p. 32–33. 1997 - Four cartographic representations based on ancient charts of the Chesapeake Bay area, Reagan National Airport, Washington, DC. It is a marble mosaic.Public Art Photo Gallery. Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority: Reagan National Airport. Retrieved January 17, 2014. 2001 - a floor piece for Chubu Cultural Center, Kurayoshi, JapanNancy Princenthal; Phillip Earenfight. Joyce Kozloff: Co+ordinates. The Trout Gallery-Dickinson; 2008. . pp. 56, 129. 2003 - Dreaming: The Passage of Time, United States Consulate, Istanbul, Turkey.Joyce Kozloff: Dreaming the Passage of Time, I, II, III. US Department of State. Retrieved January 17, 2014.
She was interested in public art because it makes art accessible to everyone, and not just the public and private collectors. She said she became disheartened after the 1990s political "culture wars", feeling she would have to censor her creative expression to create acceptable "safe art", and stopped 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.Kozloff, Joyce. Patterns of Desire. Introduction by Linda Nochlin. New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1990. 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").