Joyce Kozloff

Maui: Sugar Plantations
digital prints with pochoir and hand lithography
12 x 12 in.

“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 nonwestern world, as source and inspiration. During the 1980s, I concentrated on grand, ambitious public commissions, many in transportation centers, executed in ceramic tile and/or glass and marble mosaic, completing sixteen between 1979 and the present. Out of a desire to communicate with a broader audience, all these pieces have local and regional subject matter, sometimes ironically tweaked, sometimes catalogued as an almost archaeological enterprise.

By the 1990s, maps had become the foundation for my private work, structures into which I could insert a range of issues, particularly the role of cartography in human knowledge and as an imposition of imperial will. My map and globe works – frescoes, books, paintings, sculptures – which image both physical and mental terrain, employ mutations to raise these geopolitical issues. Often their figurations are hybrids, places known only in the imagination, composed of memories and fragments. With an increasing urgency, and moving from earlier, visionary to modern charting as impetus, I seek the physical corollaries between mapping, naming, and subjugation.”

© Joyce Kozloff