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Targets, 2000, Acrylic on canvas with wood frame

Targets, 2000

Acrylic on canvas with wood frame

108 inches diameter

 

Targets, 2000, Acrylic on canvas with wood frame

Targets, 2000

Acrylic on canvas with wood frame

108 inches diameter

Targets, 2000, Acrylic on canvas with wood frame

Targets, 2000

Acrylic on canvas with wood frame

108 inches diameter

Targets (detail), 2000, Acrylic on canvas with wood frame

Targets (detail), 2000

Acrylic on canvas with wood frame

108 inches diameter

Targets (detail), 2000, Acrylic on canvas with wood frame

Targets (detail), 2000

Acrylic on canvas with wood frame

108 inches diameter

Targets (detail), 2000, Acrylic on canvas with wood frame

Targets (detail), 2000

Acrylic on canvas with wood frame

108 inches diameter

Targets (detail), 2000, Acrylic on canvas with wood frame

Targets (detail), 2000

Acrylic on canvas with wood frame

108 inches diameter

Installation of masks in Voyages (2007)

Installation of masks in Voyages (2007)

Installation of hangings in Voyages (2007)

Installation of hangings in Voyages (2007)

Voyages 3: Cefalonia, 2004-06, Cast paper, watercolor and acrylic

Voyages 3: Cefalonia, 2004-06

Cast paper, watercolor and acrylic

8 3/8 x 5 3/8 x 4 inches

Voyages 32: Terra incoginta Nova Guinea, 2004-06, Cast paper, watercolor and acrylic

Voyages 32: Terra incoginta Nova Guinea, 2004-06

Cast paper, watercolor and acrylic

9 1/4 x 6 x 4 1/4 inches

Voyages 34: isle de Zanzibar, 2004-06, Cast paper, watercolor and acrylic

Voyages 34: isle de Zanzibar, 2004-06

Cast paper, watercolor and acrylic

9 1/4 x 6 x 4 1/4 inches

Voyages 40: Iaponia Insulae, 2004-06, Cast paper, watercolor, and acrylic

Voyages 40: Iaponia Insulae, 2004-06

Cast paper, watercolor, and acrylic

8 1/4 x 6 1/4 x 3 1/2 inches

Voyages 48: Hochelaga, 2004-06, Cast paper, watercolor, and acrylic

Voyages 48: Hochelaga, 2004-06

Cast paper, watercolor, and acrylic

8 1/4 x 6 1/4 x 3 1/2 inches

Voyages 52: Island of Juan Fernandes in the South Seas, 2004-06, Cast paper, watercolor, and acrylic

Voyages 52: Island of Juan Fernandes in the South Seas, 2004-06

Cast paper, watercolor, and acrylic

8 1/4 x 6 1/4 x 3 1/2  inches

Voyages 2: Veglia, 2004, Cast paper, watercolor and acrylic

Voyages 2: Veglia, 2004

Cast paper, watercolor and acrylic

8 3/8 x 5 3/8 x 4 inches

Voyages 19: Pola, 2004, Cast paper, watercolor, and acrylic

Voyages 19: Pola, 2004

Cast paper, watercolor, and acrylic

8 1/4 x 6 1/4 x 3 1/2 inches

Voyages 4: Isole Simie, 2004, Cast paper, watercolor and acrylic

Voyages 4: Isole Simie, 2004

Cast paper, watercolor and acrylic

8 3/8 x 5 3/8 x 4 inches

Voyages 63: Navigational Chart of Admiral Zheng He, 2007, Cast paper, watercolor and acrylic

Voyages 63: Navigational Chart of Admiral Zheng He, 2007

Cast paper, watercolor and acrylic

8 1/4 x 6 1/4 x 3 1/2 inches

Voyages 64: Muhyddin Piri Re'is, 2007, Cast paper, watercolor and acrylic

Voyages 64: Muhyddin Piri Re'is, 2007

Cast paper, watercolor and acrylic

8 1/4 x 6 1/4 x 3 1/2 inches

Voyages 61: Dutch Attacking Tidor, Spice Islands, 2007, Cast paper, watercolor and acrylic

Voyages 61: Dutch Attacking Tidor, Spice Islands, 2007

Cast paper, watercolor and acrylic

8 1/4 x 6 1/4 x 3 1/2 inches

Hangings: On a visit to Chiapas, Mexico, Kozloff was seduced by the painted houses, their deep hues and bold color contrasts. Returning to New York, she painted geometrical, architectural shapes in a simulation of those colors on heavy, coarse paper that felt like walls. When a friend from Mexico brought her tissue paper ornaments that are strung along the streets on the Day of the Dead, she realized that their skulls echoed the shapes on the Venetian “carnevale” masks which she was then painting, and the two series melded. Ultimately, Voyages included festival arts from many cultures, particularly those that related to carnival. She explored the ways this theme had morphed around the world: paper dragon kites from China, kitsch witches and ghosts at Halloween, Japanese kites with funny, smirking faces. These 40 collage paintings were mounted on eight long canvas strips, each painted a bright color to stand out in front of the busy brick surfaces at the Arsenale in Venice, where they became elements in a large ensemble, “Voyages + Targets.” The juxtaposition of jovial patterns and intense colors with death images is found in many cultures, although it might be considered macabre in ours. Masks: During the fall of 2004, the artist was in residence at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France, overlooking the Mediterranean. The sea was always present, framed by every window and door, changing with the hours of the day and the seasons, present during waking hours and in her dreams. During that time on a visit to Venice, she became aware of the cheap, kitschy “carnevale” masks sold at every tourist kiosk, loathed by the locals. She purchased unpainted, pressed paper pulp masks to decorate with maps of islands in the Mediterranean, on shades of blue that recall the ocean. Woodblocks: Shortly afterwards, she worked on woodblock prints at the Hui No’eau Cultural Center on the island of Maui, creating large images of two Hawaiian islands imprinted on translucent rice paper. Thereafter, she began painting Pacific islands on the masks, breaking from the traditional colors of water and land, evoking more widespread emotional states and cultural associations. Eventually, islands all over the world emerged on several different generic carnival faces.

 

Later that year, the hangings, wood block prints and masks came together in a large-scale installation at Thetis,* a not-for-profit space in the Venetian Arsenale. The theme was the history of navigation and the central role of Venice in that history, particularly during the “Age of Discovery” (also the greatest period of Venetian painting and cartography). European ships built in the arsenal sailed around the world, and colonized it. Sixty-five masks were displayed at eye level inside the windowpanes, with sunlight entering through their eyes. Eighteen wood block prints swung from the ceiling, and eight hanging banners framed the windows along the longest wall. The visitor crossing that vast 160’ space was meant to feel as if he/she were on a voyage around the planet earth. At the end, “Targets” awaited the viewer, its door open, inviting him/her to enter.

Biography

Joyce Kozloff - Artists - DC Moore Gallery

Joyce Kozloff was born in Somerville, New Jersey in 1942. She received a BFA from Carnegie Institute of Technology, Pittsburgh, PA 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. 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 United States Consulate, Art in Embassies Program 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, New York, NY; 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 Airport, CA.

Since the early 1990s, Kozloff has utilized mapping as a device for consolidating her enduring interests in history, culture, and the decorative and popular arts. She initially concentrated on cities known to her, onto which patterns and images reflecting their colonial pasts were then overlaid. Subsequent series examined bodies of water and the inaccuracies of early maps from the so-called “Age of Discovery.” In 1999-2000, Kozloff was awarded the Jules Guerin Fellowship / Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, Italy. During her yearlong residency abroad Kozloff conceived and completed Targets, a nine-foot walk-in globe in twenty-four sections, each of which is painted with an aerial map of a place that has been bombed by the U.S. in the years since World War II. A 2001 residency at the Bogliasco Foundation in Liguria, Italy provided the genesis for Boy's Art, a series of twenty-four collaged drawings based on maps, diagrams, and illustrations of historic battles, which examine the fascination with war shared by many young boys. Distributed Art Publishers published an oversized artist’s book of these works in 2003.

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, CA (2019-2020); Less is a Bore: Maximalist Art & Design, Institute for Contemporary Art, Boston, MA (2019); Pattern and Decoration: Ornament as Promise, Ludwig Forum, Aachen, Germany, Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Vienna, Austria, and Ludwig Museum, Budapest, Hungary (2018-2019); Pattern, Decoration & Crime, MAMCO, Geneva, Switzerland, and Le Consortium, Dijon, France (2018-2019).

In China is Near, Kozloff explored the China accessible to her, visiting the Chinatowns of Mott Street, Manhattan; Main Street, Flushing, Queens; 8th Street, Sunset Park, Brooklyn; Webster Street, Oakland; and Grant Avenue, San Francisco – all destinations on the twenty-first century Silk Route. Her photographs convey the experience of these locations, capturing the sensory overload triggered by the surfeit of kitsch – gaudy trinkets, cheap apparel, and glittering electronics. Reveling in the ways this visual clutter rhymed with her own layered, dense aesthetic, Kozloff paired these images with collages incorporating drawings of old maps, imagery from the internet, and Chinese characters and motifs. The resulting series, published as a book by Charta Books, presents a rich, immersive, unconventional chronicle of China, not 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. In her response to this historic work, Kozloff drew upon a wide range of her artistic practices, incorporating her interest 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 current U.S. presidential race. JEEZ is her subsequent attempt to grapple with the religious images that pervade Western culture. In JEEZ, Kozloff navigates through the history of art, incorporating everything from Byzantine mosaics to contemporary street art. She culls from sources high and low, from Old Master paintings to everyday kitsch, and encounters scores of representations of Jesus: black, Asian, Latino, and female; adult and infant; Jesuses from the movies and New Age hippie Jesuses. Over thirteen months, Kozloff painted 125 images of Christ into her contemporary mappa mundi. Each represents a stereotype from its culture, faithful to its own artistic ideal, but the proliferation of depictions wryly erodes their power.


Recent solo exhibitions of Kozloff's work include: Joyce Kozloff: Navigational Triangles, DC Moore Gallery, New York (2010); Joyce Kozloff: Co+Ordinates, Trout Gallery, Dickinson College, Carlisle, PA (2008); Joyce Kozloff: Voyages + Targets, Spazio Thetis, Venice, Italy (2006); Joyce Kozloff: Exterior and Interior Cartographies, Regina Gouger Miller Gallery of Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA (2006); and Joyce Kozloff: Topographies, Contemporary Art Center of Virginia, Virginia Beach, VA (2002). Crossed Purposes, a major traveling exhibition pairing the work of Joyce Kozloff with that of her husband, photographer Max Kozloff, was organized by the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, Ohio and traveled to a number of museums around the country during 1999 and 2000. Kozloff's work has been included in countless important group exhibitions, including WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, which originated at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA in Los Angeles, CA in 2006 and traveled to the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C.; P.S. 1 MOMA in Long Island City, NY; and the Vancouver Art Gallery in British Columbia, Canada.

Kozloff has served on the Board of Governors of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (Skowhegan, ME) 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 (Pittsburgh, PA) 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.

View Artist's Website

For the complete biography, please download the PDF.

Video

On the occasion of Kozloff's installation at 375 Hudson in New York City, through April 8, 2021

The Voyage Out: Joyce Kozloff in Conversation with Michael Frank

November 2, 2017

Joyce Kozloff's solo exhibition "Girlhood" will be on view at DC Moore Gallery from October 5 - November 4, 2017. See what inspired her most recent body of work.

Joyce Kozloff with Alexi Worth

April 16, 2015 at DC Moore Gallery

Women, Archives, and Artistic Legacy: The Feminist Collecting Initiative at the Archives of American Art 

April 22, 2015 at DC Moore Gallery

City As Muse: Rackstraw Downes, Joyce Kozloff, and Ethan Ryman in Conversation with Moderator John Zinsser 

Thursday, September 20, 2012 at DC Moore Gallery, New York

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