“The Days and Hours and Moments of our Lives,” colored pencil, collage and acrylic on canvas, 60 x 60 inches, by Joyce Kozloff, 2007. Kozloff will deliver a free retrospective talk of her work at 11 a.m. Tuesday, April 8, in Room 130 of the Fine and Performing Arts Center on the campus of Western Carolina University.

Joyce Kozloff, a leading artist in the pattern and decoration movement of the 1970s, will speak about her work retrospectively at 11 a.m. Tuesday, April 8, in Room 130 of the Fine and Performing Arts Center on the campus of Western Carolina University. The presentation is free and open to the public.

During her visit, Kozloff also will make smaller presentations to WCU students and faculty about her public art; her involvement in producing the video “Disarming Images,” a collaborative protest project by Artists Against the War; and her long involvement with Heresies, a feminist publication on art and politics.

Born in Somerville, N.J., in 1942, Kozloff studied at the Carnegie Institute of Technology and earned a graduate degree in fine art in 1967 from Columbia University. Her paintings and prints are ornamentally patterned compositions that reflect her intense interest in diverse cultures. The pattern and decoration movement was female-dominated and challenged the Western art world’s marginalization of the decorative arts, which were often functional, non-Western and female-produced.

A versatile artist, Kozloff has created large-scale art for public spaces, including the Harvard Square subway station, a transit station in Detroit and the National Airport. In the 1980s, she created a series of work that explored pornography in a cultural and historical context. More recently, she has created art in the form of maps and globes as metaphors for power, conquest and cultural attitudes.

“I don’t want to be someone who repeats the same shibboleths for decades, without re-examining them and questioning myself,” Kozloff once told the Journal of Contemporary Art.

Kozloff has taught at the Chicago Art Institute, the School of Visual Arts in New York and the Cooper Union, also in New York. She received two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art and Museum of Modern Art include Kozloff’s work in their collections.

Kozloff’s visit is made possible by WCU’s Visiting Scholars Program, stage and screen department, Women’s Center, women’s studies program and the Office of the Provost’s Visiting Artist Grant Series.

For more information, contact Erin Tapley, associate professor of art education, at (828) 227-3598 or etapley@wcu.edu.

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Last modified: Tuesday, March 11, 2008