Joyce Kozloff

Joyce Kozloff is an American artist who arose at a time when women around the world were coming together and had been coming together for a decade or so, to fight for the right to be treated as equals to men. This movement, better known as the "women's liberation movement of the 1960's" gave fuel to the feminist art movement, which began sometime in the early 1970s. The goal being amongst others, equal representation and appreciation of women's art in the art world. 

There is no smoke without a fire and so of course, the feminist art movement indeed arose not only because of the fact that women's art was not only being under-represented in museums, exhibitions and the like, but also because their art was seen as secondary or subordinate to art made by men.

In 1971, Kozloff joined a group of women who had come together after an art exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in which they'd found upon research, included a meager amount of women. The women called themselves the Los Angeles Council of Women Artists, and went on to protest the sexual inequality prevalent in the art world and the scarcity of women artists in the exhibition.

She travelled a lot and it was during her study of the "decorative arts" and other forms of art in these places that she had travelled to that she came to realize that the decorative arts was a domain reserved for women and non-western artists. With this realization, she came to understand the fact that the hierarchy among the arts only benefited the extention of European and American men. This supports something that Linda Nochlin pointed out in her essay Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists which goes as follows: "....men who yearn to fulfill themselves through what are often termed "feminine" artistic interests, can find themselves as painters or sculptors, rather than as volunteer museum aides or part-time ceramists, as their female counterparts so often end up doing..." 

Anyhow, her discovery of this favoritism further powered her position as a feminist and stimulated her interest in pattern design.

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"Throughout my career I have tried to fuse a love for widespread artistic traditions with an activist temperament. Beginning in 1970, energized by my participation in the feminist art movement in Los Angeles and New York, I became a founding member of the Heresies publishing collective and an originating figure of the Pattern and Decoration movement. My colleagues and I were exploring the applied and decorative arts, especially visual cultures of the non-western world, as source and inspiration. We wanted to break down the high art/low art hierarchies inherent in the West; then as now, travel has been a profound catalyst." -- Joyce Kozloff, January 2015. (Full biography here)

The Pattern and Decoration Movement was given birth to by the Feminist Art Movement and started some time in the mid 1970s. Kozloff, along with Miriam Schapiro, Valerie Jaudon and a few others, were responsible for its establishment. The movement sought to generate an interest and appreciation for "decorative" art forms such as patterning, textile, tie & dye etc, as this was a form of art often seen as not-important or not as valued as other art forms predominantly done by men.

Consequently, Kozloff began to create large paintings that incorporated patterns she had come in contact with from her various travels around the world. Beginning in 1978, she produced a collection known as An Interior Decorated; a collection which featured hand-painted, hanging silkscreen textiles;

“An Interior Decorated,” Mint Museum, Charlotte NC, view II, 1980

“An Interior Decorated,” Mint Museum, Charlotte NC, view I, 1980

“An Interior Decorated,” Tibor de Nagy Gallery, NY, 1979

Tut’s Wallpaper, 1979, silkscreen/silk, ea. 108 x 43”, 9 in series

glazed tile/wood columns;

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Cincinnati Fireplace, 1980, glazed tiles/board, 60 x 114.5”

and engravings on Chinese silk paper to name a few. More from this collection here.

Kozloff went on to produce many bodies of work, (many of them public) and cited May Stevens, Ida Applebroog, Miriam Schapiro and Nancy Spero as influences and guides.

One may refer to Kozloff's work as subversive, especially when defining it in the context of the time she was living in and how women's art was being viewed. Her art, especially her decorative pieces, served as a big "fuck you" to the forces that may be; the forces that deemed decorative arts inferior to other forms of art. Her work was a "protest" in and of itself and inspired many other artists after her, just as  Schapiro, Spero, and the rest had inspired her.  

Works Cited

1. joycekozloff.net
2. http://www.aauw.org/2013/08/28/kozloff/