Joyce Kozloff

Joyce Kozloff (born 1942) is an American artist known for her paintings, murals, and public art installations.

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.

Kozloff has lived primarily in New York since 1964.

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.

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.

She has been active in the women's and peace movements throughout her life.

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.

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.

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.

In the summer of 1973 Kozloff lived in Mexico.

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.

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.

She visited Morocco in 1975 and Turkey in 1978.

During her visits she studied the countries' decorative traditions and ornaments.

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.

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.

Kozloff was mentored and inspired by Miriam Schapiro, Nancy Spero, Ida Applebroog and May Stevens.

She was interviewed for the film !Women Art Revolution.

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.

Critic Carrie Rickey wrote that the installation was "where painting meets architecture, where art meets craft, where personal commitment meets 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".

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.

Since the early 1990s, her work has drawn extensively on cartography and patterns.