Joyce Kozloff: Girlhood by DC Moore Gallery

JOYCE KOZLOFF girlhood

JOYCE KOZLOFF

girlhood Essay by Patricia Hills Interview with the artist by Christopher Lyon

D C M O O R E G A L L E R Y

ART GIRL , 2017. Acrylic, collage, and found object on canvas, 65 x 54 x 6 1â &#x201E; 2 inches.

MAPPING JOYCE KOZLOFF’S GIRLHOOD PATRICIA HILLS

Autobiography, 2017, [p.13] initiated a new body of work by Joyce Kozloff, the Girlhood series, in which she seeks, in her words,“to integrate the old with the new.” In these works she combines her own history, in the form of actual drawings done by her as a schoolgirl, with paintings based on historic maps, which have been a source for her art since the early 1990s. Adding to the personal dimension of this new work are dolls, attached to some of the paintings, which were given to her as gifts by her parents when they returned from traveling. Most recently, she has created “satellite” paintings by redrawing on new canvases details of the large works in the series, often omitting the historic maps altogether. What is new to the multilayered Girlhood paintings is her contemporaneity, her evolving awareness and sensibility as an adult woman looking back at the ways the past has critically shaped and continually competes with the present. THE APTLY TITLED PAINTING

Many of Kozloff’s childhood drawings were made with colored pencils and crayons on rough composition paper for social studies classes when she was nine to eleven years old. She began the Girlhood series by collaging these drawings onto paintings replicating old maps. The original student exercises often include her signature —“Joyce Blumberg,” “J. Blumberg,” or “Joyce B”— and the teacher’s assessment, usually “excellent”; the majority of these drawings were ones brought home to show her parents. Eventually her mother neatly boxed and stored them in the attics of the New Jersey houses Kozloff grew up in, first in Manville, where she spent her grade school years, and in Bridgewater Township, where her family moved when she was twelve. When she and her sister-in-law were clearing out the Bridgewater house two years ago, Kozloff discovered the drawings and other memorabilia.

Kozloff added these drawings to her archives, already filled with studies for unrealized projects, artist proofs, and other documentation. Kozloff regards archival materials as a resource, to be creatively re-used for new projects. The dolls, which had stood in a glassed cabinet in her studio for years and were always meant to be looked at and not played with, have now migrated to the new work. Both drawings and dolls have a charm and talismanic presence, the dolls being attached in ingenious ways to the paintings’ top, bottom, or side edges, where the canvas folds over the stretcher bar. I will focus here on Autobiography, the first painting in the Girlhood series, to show how these paintings link her past to her present art and how her choices of images illuminate her own history and the larger one we all share. There are three components to this painting. At the top and bottom edges of Autobiography are collaged bands of decorative starbursts and designs based on Islamic patterns, which have fascinated her since the early 1970s; these particular patterns originated in her 1977 artist’s books If I Were an Astronomer and If I Were a Botanist. Having digitized old slides of the pages from those books, Kozloff tweaked and enlarged them, printed them out on canvas, and they became the grounds, over which she painted and collaged, for the works in her 2015 show at DC Moore. In this new painting, she incorporated further printouts from those books, onto which she collaged shards of triangles, parallelograms, slivers of maps, and floral shapes. The result is a decorative mosaic border that contrasts with the central painting’s markers of time (history) and space (geography). The second component is a copy of an antique map. Kozloff’s copying and altering of such maps, as backgrounds for collaged icons and figures, reaches back some twenty-

ART GIRL , 2017 (detail). Acrylic, collage, and found object on canvas, 65 x 54 x 6 1⁄ 2 inches.

ink with watercolor, which was itself copied from a 1639 map titled “Manatvs/Gelegen op de Noo[r]t Riuver,”2 that is, “Manatus (Manhattan), located on the North River,” now called the Hudson River. The map is both aesthetically appealing and historically significant: it copies the first known map of Manhattan and the surrounding areas, then claimed by the Netherlands.

Boys’ Art #21: Ottoman Campaigns, 2002 (detail). Pencil, collage, and colored pencil on paper, 12 x 18 inches. FIG. 1.

five years. Maps are for her a platform for creative ideas; in 2008 she explained to Phillip Earenfight, “a map could be a starting point, a structure for wide-ranging, diverse information, a web in which to weave other material.”1 For Kozloff the intricate detail in maps encourage visual probing, and they also stimulate questions about time and place, power and ambition, knowledge and ignorance. The use of childhood drawings, the third component of Autobiography, also has a precedent in her art. In Kozloff’s series Boys’ Art, 2002–3, she employed tiny cut-outs of heavily armed soldiers, swords, lances, and war machines, which are reduced photocopies of drawings made by her son, Nikolas, who had spent many hours during his childhood years perfecting intricate war-based imagery. She made photocopies of his drawings, reduced to a quarter of their original size, and collaged them onto her copies of maps showing sites of historic battles. She also added cut-outs of art-historical imagery, including Édouard Manet’s Fifer, Persian miniatures, Plains Indian ledger art, Piero della Francesca battle scenes, Picasso’s Guernica, and also commercial art, like Cuban cigarette box labels [ fig.1]. But it was a young boy’s fascination with images of war that intrigued her and initiated that project. For Autobiography, and the other works in the series, Kozloff turns from the imagery found in her son’s drawings and art history and instead uses her own childhood art. She has collaged her school drawings onto her painting of a 1665– 70 map, originally rendered in pen and 8

The Manatus map, whose vertical orientation is east-west, had multiple functions. As a navigational tool, it charted the channels through which ships had to pass to reach the thriving colony of New Amsterdam at the tip of Manhattan: first around Sandy Hook, New Jersey, at the left of the map, and then between Brooklyn, on the lower right, and “Staten Eylant,” as the map calls it, sailing through “The Narrows.” Letters and numbers accompany small icons; for example, sketchy houses indicate Dutch farms and plantations, long houses demarcate Native American settlements, windmills show industry, and anchors indicate harbors. The map also locates the site of the Dutch military fort. The settlers who owned those farms and plantations are keyed to numbers in an index at the lower right of the map. Letters indicate the substantial Fort Amsterdam, several mills, the settlement of blacks, and the slave quarters.3 At the lower right of the long index of farms and plantations owned by Dutch early settlers is the caption for “F,” which translates roughly as “Quarter of Blacks/Slave Trading Post.”4 [ fig.2] The marker “F” is situated in the area of today’s East 70s, on New York City’s Upper East Side, about five miles north of Fort Amsterdam. According to most histories, the Dutch East India Company introduced eleven black slaves into New Amsterdam in 1626 as a labor force to work the plantations and build roads, public structures, and the fort. While they could own personal property, had some legal rights, and could marry and keep wages earned independently, they were still slaves. Even when manumitted, as many were, they were segregated and had limited rights. In her painted copy, Kozloff retains some of the numbers, letters, and icons found on the Manatus map but eliminates the index. While the reference to Dutch slaves disappears

FIG. 2. Manatvs/Gelegen

op de Noo[r]t Riuver, 1665–70 (detail).

with the index, Kozloff still brings in other ethnic markers and distinctions by including fragments of a map of Manhattan that she created in 2016, one that references “racial colonies” and recalls the Red Scare of the 1920s. A description of this map, Waves II [ fig.3], a print commissioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is in order since portions of a trial proof have been incorporated into the imagery of Kozloff’s Autobiography.5 She based Waves II on an “ethnic”map, “The Lusk Committee Map,” which charted concentrations of immigrants — “racial colonies”— in Manhattan and the Bronx. The Lusk map’s agenda is stated at the top of Waves II: “MAP OF THE BOROUGH OF / MANHATTAN / SHOWING LOCATION AND EXTENT OF RACIAL COLONIES / WAVES.” (In the early

part of the century, “racial” was used to designate what we today would call “ethnic.”) The Lusk Committee map was one of two maps (the other was of Brooklyn) adapted by John B. Taylor from ones published by A.R. Ohman. These were used by an investigative committee, headed by New York State Senator Clayton R. Lusk, dedicated to identifying radical organizations in New York and ferreting out subversives and revolutionaries. The committee added the colors to identify immigrant neighborhoods.6 Kozloff noticed that areas colored red were labeled “Russian, Polish and other Jews.”7 During the “Red Scare,” underway at the time, the US government, in reaction to the 1917 Russian Revolution, labor unrest in the US led by socialists, and anarchist terror bombings, gave Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer license to conduct raids and

arrest immigrants and labor activists.8 These facts Kozloff knew, but she went further by including more recent patterns, based on her own research, of subsequent waves of Chinese, Dominican, Puerto Rican, and other Latino immigrants. The result is her amalgam Waves II, with Manhattan city blocks variously tinted to designate the ethnic neighborhoods in 1920, along with an overlay of decorative patterns of different colors that denote waves of immigration since the 1960s. The lower one third of Waves II, consists of a dense pattern of blue-grey waves. In Autobiography she collages fragments of trial proofs from the print Waves II at two places: at the right edge one-third the way down from the top and at the top left. The fragment at the right stands out; less evident is Kozloff’s inclusion of a narrow wedge of Waves II at the top left inscribed “Racial Colonies” on the blue-waved water. This morphs into a blue band representing the Hudson River, flowing across the top of the composition under the Islamic-inspired band. The realities of race, cultural heritage, and discrimination seem always present, whether it is in 1639, 1920, the 1960s, or 2016. Collaged onto the Manatus map are the nine childhood drawings already mentioned. One, “A Sundae with Judy,” had been the cover of a booklet she made in class. For the painting, she recreated the effect of a booklet by inserting a piece of Foam Core board within the folds of the paper. This salient image, centered at the top of the painting and projecting about one-half inch from the support, depicts “Judy,” perhaps a surrogate for Kozloff, as a girl with long brown hair and bangs, dressed in pink, seated at a table or counter, eating ice cream. Judy presides over the maps and collaged drawings below her. These include two maps of the United States, one showing average annual precipitation and the other, the distribution of cattle across the country. There are a map of the Middle Colonies prior to the American Revolution; two maps of New Jersey; a demographic chart of populations of cities in colonial America; a sheet of icons (including a couple of atom bombs) representing “Indus9

tries of the U.S.A.”; and an industrial scene, “Where iron and steel are made.” In a pictorial map of New Jersey, Manville is represented by a factory. Her home town, Manville, is remembered as the corporate headquarters of Johns-Manville, which made asbestos products, then thought to be beneficial and technologically progressive. Today we know asbestos to be a cause of deadly mesothelioma and asbestosis, a fact long denied by Manville’s executives and company doctors. Kozloff’s chart for Boston, New York, and other cities appears to give their populations in about 1700, with inventive, if anachronistic, icons representing one thousand or ten thousand people: five Statue of Liberty icons stand for the nearly 5,000 residents of New York; Philadelphia’s 4,500 people are indicated by four-and-a-half kites in thunderstorms (suggested by Ben Franklin’s electricity experiment, one supposes). Getting into the colonial regions, New England’s population of 80,000 is crowded into eight “Mayflower” ships; and eight packs of cigarettes represent the 80,000 who then lived in Virginia and Maryland. Kozloff particularly likes the six Indian heads, each with a feather, that represent the 60,000 inhabitants of the Middle Colonies.The overall effect of the array of drawings against the background of the Manatus map is to highlight the growth of the East Coast of the United States, from the turn of the eighteenth century to the mid-1950s, when it was assumed that immigration, entrepreneurship, and industry, especially in New Jersey and New York, would continuously raise the living standards for the nation. As children we are often innocent and accepting, until we learn to be critical, to perceive the spectrum of truths and untruths. Kozloff is keenly aware of the ways this works. About the Girlhood drawings she has said: “The worldview of my naïve public school pictures is that of early 1950s America — cowboys at their bonfires in the wide-open west; factories and smokestacks in small town settings; Eskimo girls and Alpine girls and Brazilian girls in their native costumes. The mindset is further away from me today than the places were then. These false scenarios unraveled for many in my generation, although not 10

FIG. 3. Waves II, 2016 (detail). Lithograph, etching, aquatint, digital archival inkjet print, and Chine collé on paper, 15 x 29 3⁄4 inches.

everywhere nor for all Americans. And that’s why my conventional grammar school innocence feels weirdly relevant to me — within our polarized society, where so many people hold onto fantasies about recovering an imaginary past.”9 Kozloff, who has worked as both a feminist and peace activist, is more insistent on asking questions than providing answers. This dialectic between the aesthetic (what you see) and the conceptual (what you know or might begin to know) underlies her work. As the Girlhood series unfolded — in 1776 [p. 44], New Worlds [p. 31], Katrinka [p.15], Art Girl [p. 5], Downtown [p. 43], The Giant of New Jersey [p.29], Calm Sea, Rough Sea [p. 33], Then and Now [p. 49], and Red States, Blue States [p. 39] — she continued to use painted copies of older maps as backgrounds on which to collage her childhood drawings. Myth, history, and geography continued to merge in a narrative about the origins and settlement of our country and the ways we come to understand the world. But as the summer of 2017 passed, the antique maps began to be replaced by the classroom maps from the childhood cache and especially the drawings done for book reports. To capture more intensely the quality of the drawings she made as a child, she began experimenting with oil pastels on canvas,“reconfiguring [the childhood drawings] into narratives that start to create fantasy landscapes,” as she puts it.10 Her own past has become a rich source for her — a source with possibilities for new directions. And she insists on making art relevant to “what is happening politically in the world now.”11

Her focus on the guilelessness, intelligence, and courage of prepubescent girls seems to strike a chord in today’s popular culture. Two recently highly publicized works that have stoked that enthusiasm come to mind. One is Fearless Girl, the four-foot-tall bronze statue by Kristen Visbal, installed on Broadway, in lower Manhattan, on March 7, 2017, the eve of International Women’s Day, with financial underwriting by State Street Global Advisors, then involved in a marketing campaign. Fearless Girl elicited a storm of press comments because it was clearly meant to confront Arturo Di Modica’s Charging Bull, an eleven-foot-high bronze that has stood at that location, since its installation in 1989.12 Another prominent image of a girl, less overtly defiant, stars in recent news: Balloon Girl, now destroyed, but done originally in 2002 as a stenciled graffiti on an outdoor wall in London’s South Bank by the anonymous street artist who goes by the name of Banksy. Reproduced photographs of the original graffiti show a young girl reaching up for a heart-shaped red balloon fluttering above her, while in the background, high on an adjacent wall, is an inscription in block letters,

“THERE IS ALWAYS HOPE.” In a recent poll conducted by the Samsung corporation, Banksy’s piece was voted the most popular artwork in Britain.13

Kozloff’s early 1950s drawing of the fictional Russian girl Katrinka in a red dress, now collaged onto the painting Katrinka, is a noteworthy predecessor to Fearless Girl, without the overtones of commerce and marketing. This and another drawing of Katrinka were originally done by Joyce Blumberg as covers for book reports on Helen Eggleston Haskell’s children’s novel, Katrinka: The Story of a Russian Child, first published in1915. Kozloff made digital reductions of both images to include as collage details for My Girls [p. 23] and Working on the Railroad [p. 25]. The cover of Haskell’s book,“the story of a little girl who danced her way straight to her heart’s desire,” shows us feisty Katrinka, an adventurous peasant child in repressive Czarist Russia. Far removed from Russia, Kozloff’s Katrinka stands in a red dress, head cocked, arms akimbo, independent — and ready to take on the world.

PATRICIA HILLS , Professor Emerita, Boston University, has published books, written essays, and curated major exhibitions on

19th and 20th century and contemporary American art and artists, including Eastman Johnson, John Singer Sargent, Stuart

Davis, Alice Neel, May Stevens, and Jacob Lawrence. She is currently working on a book on the art and career of Joyce Kozloff.

I want to thank Joyce Kozloff for showing me the range of her work and for spending the time to discuss her life and art with me. I also want to thank Patricia Johnston, the art historian who curated Kozloff’s mid-career exhibition at the Boston University Art Gallery in 1986, for her close reading of an early draft and for her suggestions.

1. Quoted in Phillip Earenfight, “Questions for Joyce Kozloff,” in Nancy Princenthal and Phillip Earenfight, Joyce Kozloff Co+Ordinates (Carlisle, PA: The Trout Gallery, distributed by D.A.P., 2008), p. 50. 2. See Robert T. Augustyn and Paul E. Cohen, Manhattan in Maps: 1527–1995, New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 1997, pp. 28–31. 3. Augustyn and Cohen, p. 28, concluded that “the original of this map was prepared by the colonists at the request of the directors of the Dutch West India Company to display the pattern of settlement resulting from the institution of the patroon system.” With the patroon system large landholders, often investors of the Dutch West India Company, were allotted very large tracts of land with the understanding they would develop a thriving colony within a short number of years.

4. I am grateful to Professor Michael Zell of Boston University for assisting me with the general meaning of the translation.

9. “Joyce Kozloff: Artist’s Statement,” DC Moore Gallery, Summer 2017.

5. The printers of Waves II are Judith Solod-

Hills, August 10, 2017.

kin of Solo Impression and Gregory Burnet, of Burnet Editions.

11. Email from Joyce Kozloff to Patricia

6. Ohman then issued and widely sold the

“Map of the Borough of Manhattan and part of The Bronx showing location and extent of Racial Colonies” was 81⁄8 x 26 5⁄8 inches; see Augustyn and Cohen, pp.150–51. 7. Email from Joyce Kozloff to Patricia Hills,

July 5, 2017. 8. I thank Joyce Kozloff for supplying me with some of her research sources for the Ohman maps, including Lisa Miller’s essay “Mapping the first Red Scare: Ohman’s map of ‘racial colonies’,” published by the Brooklyn Historical Society Blog. Miller cites Angela M. Blake, How New York Became American, 1890 –1924 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006).

10. Email from Joyce Kozloff to Patricia

Hills, July 5, 2017. 12. See https://www.villagevoice.com/

2017/04/25/fearless-girl-is-not-your-friend/ 13. The image lives on as a popular poster,

available through Amazon; truncated images can be found on mugs, pillows, and even as a Justin Bieber tattoo. According to the Samsung poll, Balloon Girl beat out beloved favorites by John Constable, JMW Turner, and Thomas Gainsborough, and album covers by Peter Blake and Hipgnosis and George Hardie. See Claire Voon, “Banksy’s ‘Balloon Girl’ Voted Britain’s Favorite Artwork,” Hyperallergic, July 26, 2017, accessed August 10, 2017.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY, 2017. Acrylic, collage, and crayon on canvas, 48 x 48 inches. (above, detail)

KATRINKA , 2017. Acrylic, collage, and found object on canvas, 62 x 54 x 31â &#x201E; 2 inches. (opposite, detail)

THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG GIRL

THE SCHOOLROOM AND THE STUDIO CHRISTOPHER LYON IN CONVERSATION WITH JOYCE KOZLOFF CHISTOPHER LYON (CL):

Your new show includes paintings, based on antique maps, which also incorporate drawings made by you when you were a child, which you discovered in your parents’ house several years ago after your mother passed away. Recently the critic Max Kozloff, your husband, made a funny but penetrating comment. He said it actually is a two-person show, of a young, talented artist, Joyce Blumberg (your childhood self), and Joyce Kozloff, the mature artist. That observation suggests a visual dialogue between a time of innocence, let’s say, and a time of knowledge; between a youthful time when you perhaps took things at face value, and today, when you are digging into the concepts behind them.

attorney. There was a Catholic church across the street from the elementary school, and on Mondays the students would go to catechism class at 2:00. School let out at 3:00, so I’d be sitting alone at my desk for an hour. The teacher would give me crayons and paper and I would draw. I liked it. When I grew up, I loved going to churches to see art, but I never saw the interior of that church. CL:

Probably you did not make all the drawings in this new work on those Monday afternoons! But it’s fascinating to see — given your engagement with maps in your artwork over the past several decades — that many of the drawings incorporated into these new paintings are maps. JK:

JOYCE KOZLOFF (JK):

The maps were made for my social studies classes, when I was between ages nine and eleven. I recall loving geography and history, but I honestly don’t remember making the maps, though I’m not surprised. Or maybe I am a little surprised. I do remember making a group project on a table in social studies. We created a big relief map by building up the mountains with flour and water and then painting it. I don’t know what continent it was or whether it was the whole earth, but I recall working together and thinking it was really great. Then later it cracked.

Some months after gathering them up, I gingerly brought them out to study. There was much I recognized about myself: a compulsive attention to detail; fascination with strange, inexplicable images; and experiments with different kinds of representation. Back then, I appropriated meticulously from books, as I still do today. Representing their different stages of life, the young girl and the adult woman began to shift back and forth within the pictorial space, and between two modes of thinking about similar subjects. Each operates both outside and inside her sources, but today with more critical consciousness.

CL:

JK:

You made these drawings at school — were you encouraged to draw? JK: I went to elementary school in a small town, Manville, New Jersey. Almost everybody was first or second-generation Polish, most worked in the Johns-Manville asbestos factory, and just about all were Catholic. We were a Jewish, middle-class family; my dad was the borough

How did you come upon the drawings?

After my mother died in December, 2014, my sister-inlaw and I cleaned out the house, one day a week for seven months. On the very last visit, I found my childhood art. As my folks were packrats, I should have expected it. These cartographic drawings were in organized folders with other assignments inside a rusty filing cabinet lying on its side under the eaves of the dark, unlit attic. If I hadn’t discovered this cache, I wouldn’t have this body of work.

CL: Besides the drawings, you have attached quite a number of dolls to the edges or onto shelves projecting from the new paintings.

CL: I love the painter! She’s a doll at an easel, wearing pedal pushers and a ponytail. JK:

JK:

Some years before I brought the drawings home from New Jersey, I had retrieved my childhood foreign doll collection, and certain of those toys found their way into the work, parading along shallow stage-like platforms. Sometimes I arranged them in a row across the top or bottom of the painting, like the predellas at the base of Renaissance altarpieces — stories within stories. The reference to art history combines with layers of personal and political history. The inclusion of the dolls was a decision of the adult artist to introduce a kind of pathos, as well as a girlish silliness.

CL: That’s interesting. So they are souvenirs of travel, bought for you, right? JK:

Yes.

CL: And the images are, in a sense, places you’ve imaginatively traveled to. This is very interesting given your fascination with maps. JK:

At that time in my life, I had never traveled anywhere; maybe a few places in the US, certainly never outside of the US. But my parents made a trip to Europe in 1950. I can imagine my mother going into stores that sold dolls in each country, studying them and finding the one she wanted to buy for me. But maybe she was buying them for herself really — you know? Because they weren’t the kind of dolls you play with. They were kept in a case. CL:

Where were they in your house?

They were in my bedroom. I remember when she came back, she opened the boxes and the dolls had tissue paper around them — it was very special. And they remained at my parents’ house all these years. When I brought them back to New York, the artist Jane Kaufman restored them beautifully for me. JK:

I know. Isn’t that amazing? To me, she looks like a 1950s movie star, especially Audrey Hepburn. I call the painting she’s attached to Art Girl. I also started to appropriate my childhood drawings other than maps. CL:

Can we discuss some examples of those?

JK:

I made a booklet about every state, and I have those booklets. Some of them are shaped: Michigan is in the shape of a car, North Dakota’s is the state bird and Idaho’s a potato. There’d be pages inside with information about population and crops and industry. So I took the booklets apart to use in the paintings.

CL:

You certainly were obsessed with symbolic representations ... I can’t believe it [laughs]. You must’ve known a lot about American geography when you were a kid. JK:

They made us memorize the capital of every state, the capital of every country. That was part of our education in the public schools. After awhile, I realized how many of these images were made to illustrate book reports: The Land of the Alps, and Katrinka, about a Russian girl, and a Nancy Drew mystery, The Clue of the Velvet Mask. Every time I wrote a book report, I illustrated it. I sometimes copied the actual book cover, but I also made my own book covers, and I copied illustrations from inside the books. I was a reader. A number of drawings illustrate books by Louisa May Alcott, and I read them all — I guess all girls at that time did. There is one for Five Little Peppers and How They Grew. Often I would include names of the author and of characters in the book: one drawing lists the protagonists in a book called Eight Cousins. I also made pictures of my grandmother, with whom I spent a lot of time as a kid. Several of those are in the new painting called 2 Rivers.

CL:

Here is one called The Giant and the Bumblebee.

JK:

This clumsy character is a detail of the larger painting called The Giant of New Jersey. And the bumblebee also appears at the bottom of Calm Sea, Rough Sea. When I had a show at Tibor de Nagy Gallery in the early 1970s, I received an envelope, and in it was a letter, which I still have, written by my second grade teacher, Mrs. Stryker. She wrote, “I knew…you were an exceptional artist,” and so she saved the giant and the bumblebee, and they were in that envelope. The giant appears to have been copied from a jigsaw puzzle. I don’t remember drawing the giant or the bumblebee — I was in second grade!

CL: These satellite pictures, often smaller than the mapbased canvases, have a more unified treatment. What is the medium? JK:

New Worlds, 2017 (detail). Acrylic, collage, and crayon on canvas, 54 x 42 inches. FIG. 1.

CL: I had asked you who you were doing the drawings for, maybe for the teachers, maybe for parents or grandparents, maybe yourself? What I’m trying to get at is the reason for the precision. What’s the function of the careful copying? Who were these drawings for, exactly? JK:

It must’ve given me pleasure to sit there and do that, in a very focused way. I’ve copied tiny animals and sea creatures from my girlhood studies onto the dominant maps in some of these paintings, like New Worlds [ fig.1]; they are visible to the viewer if he or she moves up close. Then I began sketching entire childhood drawings — which were by then attached to the other paintings — directly onto smaller canvases, creating enclosed, subsidiary works excerpted and reinterpreted from the first series. I call them satellite paintings. These works have a different flavor. They are more fluid, tactile, and lyrical; the colors are soft and sweet. There is a dreamlike landscape space emerging.

Paint didn’t capture the nubby, grainy look of the childhood source images. So I went out and bought children’s art supplies — crayons, pastel, oil pastels, and invented a hybrid process. At first I tried using crayons and charcoal and pastel. Then I added oil pastels. The ground is an acrylic wash. The originals were drawn on paper that has aged and is now the color of tea. Their presence gives the series a warm tonality. I always try to differentiate each canvas chromatically, to evoke personal associations. My Girls, with its strange hovering spaceship, is dark and menacing. 3 Elephants, with its cheery little yodeler boy doll, is airy and light. CL: One of the things that’s striking about the large mapbased paintings is that you could just stand at sort of a comfortable two-foot distance and read them. Besides being a painting, it functions as a document . . . JK:

I copied everything that was in the source image. As with my earlier Knowledge frescoes, I chose for my backgrounds early maps that are geographically incorrect to contemporary eyes. Their “wrongness” gives them a childish quality that complements my elementary school hand.

CL: One might say knowledge also is a subject of this new work, but it is approached differently. There’s an aspect of both obscuring and uncovering knowledge. Interestingly, it is the “innocent” childhood work that is superimposed on, and thus obscures, the “knowing” mature imagery. What may have seemed natural to your young self now might appear dangerously naïve — something like the asbestos produced in that factory, which was taken for granted as being a beneficial product at the time and turns out to have been a deadly carcinogen. The superimposition of the childhood drawings onto the map paintings has many aspects, of course. The drawings are derived from “missing” maps — the ones you copied — which we do not see here. They’re imperfect reflections of mostly unidentifiable originals. Then they have been collaged onto renderings of antique maps, which are much more accurate as copies, but pretty inaccurate as representations of actual places, more inaccurate, for the most part, than the childhood drawings! At the same time, the antique maps convey valuable historical information, which the collaged drawings obscure ... FIG. 2. Red

Good, you’re giving me an opportunity to talk about collage! In my art, I shift back and forth between literal and metaphorical collage: sometimes it is a layering of images or fragments, but other times, I layer ideas. It’s an intuitive approach that I often don’t understand while the work is in process. These pieces are now moving into assemblage, which emerged in a very large 2015 artwork, The Tempest, onto which I attached hundreds of tiny globes. I’ve been living with it in my studio ever since: I can credit it with opening up the possibilities of 3D add-ons! JK:

States, Blue States, 2017 (detail). Acrylic and collage on canvas,

36 x 48 inches.

here is Europe. This is Rome, which is always central in these maps. Here is France — “Francia.” Now, if the map were the other way around, it would be easier to understand for us. But the orientation wasn’t codified then; north and south were not necessarily represented as up and down, like in our maps; so you could look at them from different angles. But everybody comments on the fact that it looks upside-down. CL:

[ fig.2],

CL: Here is a painting, Red States, Blue States that incorporates some of the maps of states that were in the reports that you mentioned.

This map could be viewed horizontally, so that you would walk around it and read it from various directions; or it could be hung vertically. Its orientation is ambiguous ... JK:

Yes, the underlying painting is based on a medieval map of the known world. Medieval maps are often circular or oblong. Up here is Africa, then we move into the Near East. You see Egypt, Judea, Mesopotamia. Down JK:

I finished this right after the election in November. And that’s when I put the drawings of states on it and turned it into Red States, Blue States. I hadn’t planned to do that. And so, for me, the upside down aspect became part of the meaning.

CL: That makes sense. That’s the first thing I thought, actually, when I looked at it: “It’s like our country has been turned upside down.” JK:

It has, I think.

CL:

And we’ve returned to the Middle Ages?

JK:

I hope not.

CL:

This new work suggests a kind of implicit dialogue between the schoolroom and the studio — ”schoolroom” understood in a conceptual way, not literally your grade school classroom, necessarily, but a place where you learn things, a place where you do research, look at books, investigate images. The paintings are almost concrete representations of the back and forth. JK:

I enjoy my quirky research, which leads me down unexpected byways and corridors — and these days, much of it is done sitting at my desk on my computer. We haven’t talked about humor: there are funny and ironic notes in these works, which turn up when I’m scavenging for images. There is also an echo here of your own history as an artist. You came of age in a time of process art, conceptual art, but you went in a different direction . . .

CL: Right. You found ways to objectify what you’re doing and put a certain kind of distance between your head and your art-making process. That impulse is a constant through the postwar period, but it tends to be submerged, at least in discussions of Abstract Expressionism. Maybe to draw that out just a little bit more, trying to get at the essence of your artistic personality, one could observe that you’re not relying on a spontaneous inspirational moment or something like that. You’re looking for a system or a source or... JK:

I have to be anchored to specific visual information, and maps are one of the foremost ways in which we receive information in the twenty-first century. For twentyfive years, I have been participating in a quiet dialogue with a wide range of contemporary artists utilizing mapping to dramatize pressing issues in today’s world, each in his/her own way (Mona Hatoum, Guillermo Kuitca, Julie Mehretu, Alighiero e Boetti, Nancy Graves), although I have never met any of them!

CL: And you work in series. You tend to work through projects, like this one.

CL:

By embracing the decorative, I rejected the reductive thinking that was going on around me, and opened myself to other traditions. Together with the other Pattern & Decoration artists, I went in a direction that was more inclusive, more expansive. However, there always was an underlying grid in my work, and the grid of course, was a trademark of process-oriented art. You can see: that’s my working method. I’m using a grid to copy this Arabic map right now.

Right, always. [laughs] When I use up all the old drawings — I have enough for two or three more paintings — that’s it. JK:

JK:

CL:

And then you’ll have to think of another project.

JK:

Yes ...but these youthful drawings were projects too! Maybe I’m still in elementary school [laughs]. And quite possibly, we all became ourselves back then.

CHRISTOPHER LYON , an independent scholar and editor, is the author of books including Nancy Spero: The Work (Prestel,

2010), contributes regularly to Bookforum and other publications, and produces digital and print editions of art titles under

the imprint Lyon Artbooks.

MY GIRLS , 2017. Acrylic, charcoal, pastel, and oil pastel on canvas, 30 x 34 inches.

WORKING ON THE RAILROAD, 2017. Acrylic, collage, and oil pastel on canvas, 36 x 24 inches. (opposite, detail)

THE GIANT AND THE BUMBLEBEE , 2017. Acrylic, collage, pastel, oil pastel, and oil on canvas, 34 x 30 inches.

THE GIANT OF NEW JERSEY, 2017. Acrylic, collage, oil pastel, and photograph on canvas, 49 x 37 inches. (opposite, detail)

NEW WORLDS, 2017. Acrylic, collage, and crayon on canvas, 54 x 42 inches.

CALM SEA , ROUGH SEA , 2017. Acrylic and collage on canvas, 60 x 60 inches. (overleaf, detail)

3 ELEPHANTS , 2017. Acrylic, collage, pastel, oil pastel, and found object on canvas, 30 1⁄4 x 42 x 3 3⁄4 inches.

RED STATES , BLUE STATES, 2017. Acrylic and collage on canvas, 36 x 48 inches.

DREAM OF THE AMERICAN WEST, 2017. Acrylic, collage, oil pastel, pastel, and found objects on canvas, 47 x 56 1â &#x201E; 2 x 2 inches.

DOWNTOWN , 2017. Acrylic and collage on canvas, 46 x 36 inches. (this page, detail)

1776 , 2017. Acrylic, collage, and crayon on canvas, 171â &#x201E; 2 x 62 inches.

2 RIVERS , 2017. Acrylic, collage, and oil pastel on canvas, 72 x 48 inches.

THEN AND NOW, 2017. Acrylic, collage, and found objects on canvas, 72 x 60 x 3 inches. (opposite, detail)

PUBLIC COLLECTIONS

Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, CA Albany Institute of History and Art, NY Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, OH Art in Public Places Collection, Hawaii State Foundation on Culture and the Arts, Honolulu, HI Art Museum, Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, MA Bartlett Center for the Visual Arts, Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, OK Brooklyn Museum, NY Carnegie Mellon University Libraries, Pittsburgh, PA Casa de las AmĂŠricas, Havana, Cuba College of Wooster Art Museum, OH Davis Museum & Cultural Center, Wellesley College, MA Dayton Art Institute, OH Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, DE Faulconer Gallery, Grinnell College, IA Freedman Gallery, Albright College, Reading, PA Fogg Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA Grey Art Gallery, New York University, NY Nora Eccles Harrison Museum, Logan, UT Hebrew Union College Museum, Jewish Institute of Religion Museum, New York, NY

Indianapolis Museum of Art, IN

New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, NM

Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers, The

New York Public Library, NY

State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick, NJ The Jersey City Museum, NJ

Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, FL David Owsley Museum of Art, Ball State University,

The Jewish Museum, New York, NY

Muncie, IN

Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, NE

The Palmer Museum of Art at Pennsylvania State

John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI Library of Congress, Washington, DC List Gallery, Swarthmore College, PA The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College,

University, University Park, PA Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA Racine Art Museum, WI Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA

Poughkeepsie, NY

Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC

Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA

Springfield Art Museum, MO

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA

The Trout Gallery, Dickinson College, Carlisle, PA

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY

University Art Gallery, New Mexico State University,

Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis, MO Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Udine, Italy The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY

Las Cruces, NM University of Arizona Museum of Art, Tucson, AZ University of California Santa Barbara Library, Judith A. Hoffberg Archive, CA Weatherspoon Art Museum, The University of North

National Academy Museum, New York, NY

Carolina at Greensboro, NC

National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY

National Museum of Women in the Arts,

Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery at Scripps College,

Washington, DC

The Claremont Colleges, CA

Neue Galerie-Sammlung Ludwig, Aachen, Germany

Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT

New Jersey State Museum, Trenton, NJ

DC M O O R E G A L L E R Y 535 West 22nd Street

New York New York 10011 212.247.2111

dcmooregaller y.com

This catalogue was published on the occasion of the exhibition J O Y C E K O Z L O F F: G I R L H O O D DC MOORE GALLERY O C T O B E R 5 – N O V E M B E R 4, 2017

Catalogue © DC Moore Gallery, 2017 Mapping Joyce Kozloff’s Girlhood © Patricia Hills, 2017 The Schoolroom and the Studio: Christopher Lyon in Conversation with Joyce Kozloff © Christopher Lyon, 2017 ISBN: 978 - 0 - 9993167-1- 9

cover: Art Girl, 2017 (detail). Acrylic, collage, and found object on canvas, 65 x 54 x 6 1⁄ 2 inches.

pages 2/3: Dream of the American West, 2017 (detail). Acrylic, collage, oil pastel, pastel, and found objects on canvas, 47 x 56 1⁄ 2 x 2 inches.