Joyce Kozloff, Cradles to Conflicts

MAPPING
CONFLICT: JOYCE KOZLOFF MAKES NJ DEBUT

Rowan
exhibit examines American military exploits through artistic lens

Joyce
Kozloff’s, a New Jersey native and a major figure in both the Pattern and
Decoration and the Feminist art movements of the 1970s, debuts her solo
exhibition in New Jersey at Rowan University Art Gallery. Running from January
21 through March 15, the exhibit is welcomed with a gallery talk by the artist
and reception on Wednesday, January 29 at 5 pm.

Cradles to Conquests: Mapping American Military
History is a selection of Kozloff’s work
completed between 2000 and 2010, which dramatize imagined and historical
military events through the veil of decorative arts. the works utilize collage,
cartography and mapping as an extension of Joyce’s decorative arts
sensibilities and her work as a feminist and anti-war activist.  Ironically, her artistic practice, once widely
viewed as “gender-specific” (appliqué, weaving, pattern, decorative) are used
to question the propaganda of the military and challenge the authority of a
patriarchal culture.

Curated by gallery
director Mary Salvante, the works selected for this exhibition intentionally narrows
the focus on maps and imagery that depict US military engagements and exploits
in the name of expansion and national interests.  The exhibition features several of Kozloff’s
iconic pieces such as Targets, a walk
in globe that depicts all of the US bombing sites around the world, Boys Art Series which collages innocent,
youthful drawing done by the artists son with nautical maps, and Rocking the Cradle and larger than life
size baby cradle with a map of Mesopotamia the seat of cultivation and to this
day a very sensitive location for the US military.

Kozloff, a New Jersey
native and a major figure in both the Pattern and Decoration and the Feminist
art movements of the 1970s, began to focus on public art in 1979. She expanded the
scale of her installations and the accessibility of her art to reach a wider
audience and, since the early 1990s, has utilized mapping as a device for expressing
her interests in history, culture, politics and the decorative and popular
arts. She’s had solo exhibitions at the DC Moore Gallery in New York; Trout
Gallery at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania; Spazio Thetis in Venice, Italy;
and Regina Gouger Miller Gallery of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Her
work has been included in group exhibitions at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA,
National Museum of Women in the Arts, MoMA P.S.1, Vancouver Art Gallery and The
Jewish Museum in New York. Recently, her work was included in the Kemper Museum
of Contemporary Art’s The Map as Art.

The works included in the
exhibition are courtesy of the artist and DC Moore gallery and several private
collectors. This program is made possible in part by funds from the New Jersey
State Council on the Arts.