Joyce Kozloff was born in Somerville, New Jersey, in 1942. She earned her BFA from Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, PA, in 1964 and her MFA from Columbia University in 1967. Kozloff emerged as a significant figure in both the Pattern and Decoration and Feminist art movements of the 1970s. In 1979, she shifted her focus to public art, expanding the scale of her installations to make her work more accessible to a broader audience. She has since completed numerous major commissions in public spaces, including "Dreaming: The Passage of Time" for the U.S. Consulate in Istanbul, Turkey; "The Movies: Fantasies and Spectacles" for the Los Angeles Metro's Seventh and Flower Station, CA; "Caribbean Festival Arts" for P.S. 218 in New York, NY; "New England Decorative Arts" for the Harvard Square Subway Station in Cambridge, MA; and "Bay Area Victorian, Bay Area Deco, Bay Area Funk" for the International Terminal at San Francisco Airport, CA.
Since the early 1990s, Kozloff has used mapping to integrate her enduring interests in history, culture, and the decorative and popular arts. She initially focused on cities familiar to her, overlaying them with patterns and images reflecting their colonial histories. Subsequent series explored bodies of water and the inaccuracies of early maps from the "Age of Discovery." In 1999-2000, Kozloff was awarded the Jules Guerin Fellowship / Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome. During her year-long residency, she conceived and completed "Targets," a nine-foot walk-in globe in twenty-four sections, each painted with an aerial map of places bombed by the U.S. since World War II. A 2001 residency at the Bogliasco Foundation in Liguria, Italy, inspired "Boy's Art," a series of twenty-four collaged drawings based on maps, diagrams, and illustrations of historic battles, examining the fascination with war shared by many young boys. An oversized artist's book of these works was published by Distributed Art Publishers in 2003.
Recently, Kozloff's work has been featured in several national and international museum exhibitions focusing on the Pattern and Decoration movement: "With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972-1985" at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA (2019-2020); "Less is a Bore: Maximalist Art & Design" at the Institute for Contemporary Art, Boston, MA (2019); "Pattern and Decoration: Ornament as Promise" at the Ludwig Forum in Aachen, Germany, the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Vienna, Austria, and the Ludwig Museum in Budapest, Hungary (2018-2019); and "Pattern, Decoration & Crime" at MAMCO in Geneva, Switzerland, and Le Consortium in Dijon, France (2018-2019).
In "China is Near," Kozloff explored accessible parts of China by visiting Chinatowns in Manhattan, Flushing, Brooklyn, Oakland, and San Francisco—destinations on the modern Silk Route. Her photographs capture the sensory overload of these locations, filled with kitsch items such as gaudy trinkets, cheap apparel, and glittering electronics. Embracing the visual clutter that resonated with her layered, dense aesthetic, Kozloff paired these images with collages incorporating old map drawings, internet imagery, and Chinese characters and motifs. This series, published as a book by Charta Books, presents a rich, immersive, and unconventional chronicle of China, not as a travelogue of a country visited, but of one traversed nonetheless.
In March 2012, Kozloff's "JEEZ" was exhibited at the main entrance to The Armory Show Modern. "JEEZ" is a twelve-by-twelve-foot painting in thirty-six panels based on the Ebstorf map, a 13th-century mappa mundi of the same size painted on thirty sewn goatskins. Responding to this historic work, Kozloff incorporated her interests in cartography, decoration, history, material culture, and politics. As a secular person, she was particularly motivated by the ongoing evangelical rhetoric of some candidates in the U.S. presidential race. "JEEZ" is her attempt to grapple with the pervasive religious imagery in Western culture. In this work, Kozloff navigates art history, incorporating elements from Byzantine mosaics to contemporary street art. She draws from high and low sources, from Old Master paintings to everyday kitsch, and features diverse representations of Jesus: black, Asian, Latino, and female; adult and infant; movie Jesuses and New Age hippie Jesuses. Over thirteen months, Kozloff painted 125 images of Christ into her contemporary mappa mundi, with each stereotype faithful to its artistic ideal but collectively diminishing their power through proliferation.