Joyce Kozloff’s exhibition at The Everson Museum of Art (401 Harrison Street, Syracuse, New York) maps her significant career as an artist. It is a global view of society as seen through the veil of decorative pattern.
There is a distinct femininity about the work due to the color palette and the meticulousness of possibly holding a tiny paper between tweezers, laying it atop an old map that may have been located via browsing flea markets or antique shops then applying it to the artwork with glues, precision and painstaking patience, adding drawing, colored pencil and other media – and then multiplying that effect by all the pieces presented in this show that were created over forty years.
The dedication to this process and the willingness to continue to both work and present the epic conclusion not as a retrospective but as a rest stop on the road to the next and the next addition to her travels is truly inspiring.
I am in awe of the beauty of this showcase. The way the three dimensional pieces mimic the ideals of the collages, the way the vintage, current and even celestial maps are layered to become something other, as though Kozloff has created a new world that is truly breathtaking – it’s soooo good.
I stood inside the sphere in the center of the second gallery – a sort of echo chamber that allowed me to pretend I was Jodie Foster in the movie “Contact”, an explorer heading to another realm. One could spend hours in there inspecting all the detail.
I guarantee students would love this and I encourage local art teachers to plan a field trip soon.
The Joyce Kozloff: Contested Territories (1983-2023) exhibition runs through April 5, 2026.
Oh, and this thing (above) spins!
Joyce Kozloff (b. 1942) is 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 across the globe, most recently Memory and Time at the Carroll A. Campbell Jr. United States Courthouse in Greenville, South Carolina. 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. Her work is in public collections across the country including the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; the Jewish Museum, New York, NY; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY. Kozloff received a BFA from Carnegie Institute of Technology, Pittsburgh, PA in 1964 and an MFA from Columbia University in 1967.
