Joyce Kozloff (b. 1942)

Joyce Kozloff was born in Somerville, NJ in 1942. She received a BFA from Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1964 and an MFA from Columbia University in 1967. Kozloff was a major figure in both the Pattern and Decoration and the Feminist art movements of the 1970s. She was mentored and inspired by the artists Miriam Schapiro, Nancy Spero, Ida Applebroog, and May Stevens.

In 1971, she joined with other women in the arts 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. 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 these visits she studied the countries' decorative traditions and ornaments. 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 serving as the catalyst for 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.

In 1979, she began to focus on public art, increasing the scale of her installations and expanding the accessibility of her art to reach a wider audience. Kozloff has since executed a number of major commissions in public spaces, including: Dreaming: The Passage of Time for the U.S. Consulate, Art in Embassies Program in Istanbul, Turkey; The Movies: Fantasies and Spectacles for the Los Angeles Metro’s Seventh and Flower Station; Caribbean Festival Arts for P.S. 218, New York; New England Decorative Arts for the Harvard Square Subway Station, Cambridge, MA; and Bay Area Victorian, Bay Area Deco, Bay Area Funk for the International Terminal, San Francisco International Airport.

Most recently, Kozloff's work has been included in several national and international museum exhibitions focusing on the Pattern and Decoration movement: With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972-1985, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2019-2020); Less is a Bore: Maximalist Art & Design, Institute for Contemporary Art, Boston (2019); Pattern and Decoration: Ornament as Promise, Ludwig Forum, Aachen, Germany, Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung, Vienna, and Ludwig Museum, Budapest (2018-2019); Pattern, Decoration & Crime, MAMCO, Geneva, and Le Consortium, Dijon, France (2018-2019).

Kozloff was a 2004 recipient of the prestigious Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, and most recently, won the 2017 Purchase Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She has exhibited globally over the past five decades, with many group and solo shows at such venerable institutions as Tibor de Nagy Gallery, Barbara Gladstone Gallery, DC Moore Gallery, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, the Museum of Modern Art, the Aldrich Museum, and David Zwirner Gallery, among many others. Her work can be found in the permanent collections of institutions such as the Brooklyn Museum, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art, and the Yale University Art Museum.

Kozloff has served on the Board of Governors of the Skowhegan (Maine) School of Painting and Sculpture since 1998 and has been a member of the National Academy of Design since 2003. She was on the Department of Art Advisory Board at Carnegie Mellon University from 1992-1998, the Board of Directors of the College Art Association from 1985-1989, and the Advisory Board of the Public Art Fund from 1984-1986.

Source: DC Moore Gallery