In 1973, gallery owner Tibor de Nagy called Joyce Kozloff. His voice trembled as he told her that Clement Greenberg had just left the back room after giving a rave review of her latest work. Greenberg had mocked the artist’s “Three Facades” (1973), a painting based on the rich tapestry of interlocking bricks and tiles on Churrigueresque church facades in Mexico, saying it “looked like ladies’ embroidery” — as if that were a bad thing. Kozloff told us that “Tibor panicked” and asked her to “take it away.”
Greenberg had unknowingly rejected the artist’s first painting in a major art movement of which she was an important founding member: Pattern and decorationalso known as ‘P&D’, which emerged from the booming folk revival and feminist protest era of the 1970s. Fed up with the harsh abstraction and minimalism favored by the white men who dominated the art world, P&D leaned on lavish decorative surfaces, cultural ornamentation, and unapologetically crafty aesthetics.
Of course, it was critics like Greenberg against whom P&D rebelled. He is quoted twice in a 1978 article that Kozloff wrote with Valerie Jaudon: “Art hysterical notions of progress and culture.” Published in the feminist art magazine Heresies (of which Kozloff was also a founding member), they wrote that in “rereading the basic texts of modern art… we discovered a disturbing belief system based on the moral superiority of the art of Western civilization.” They “came to realize that the prejudice against the decorative has a long history and is based on hierarchies: visual art over decorative art, Western art over non-Western art, men’s art over women’s art.”
Fortunately, Kozloff’s career was not in the hands of Clement Greenberg. Kozloff went on to put on dozens of shows, decorate more than a dozen buildings and transportation systems with public works of art over the decades, and inspire new generations of artists to lean unapologetically into ornament. Once an active member of the peace protests of the 1960s, she has also continued her political activism, which has become more explicit in her work in the 21st century. Her all-over pattern paintings have been turned into detailed maps, from Civil War battle plans exploding with viruses to aeronautical maps littered with points the United States bombed.
In this episode of the Hyperallergic Podcast you will hear the interview that our editor-in-chief Hrag Vartanian recorded with Kozloff in 2021, just after the opening of With pleasure: pattern and decoration in American art 1972–1985 at Bard College’s Hessel Museum of Art, which the institution called “the first full-scale scholarly North American survey” of the P&D movement. They talk about everything from her mother’s embroidery to her travels in Turkey and Iran that inspired her art. You still hear about it Hyperallergic Staff writer Maya Pontone, who spent the past year reporting on Kozloff’s iconic public artwork at Cambridge’s Harvard Square train station, which is currently in danger of disappearing. And if you’ve been listening closely this season, you’ll recognize some recurring characters: Columbia professor Stephen Greene; the Heresies collective; Joyce’s partner, writer Max Kozoff, and; of course Clement Greenberg.
Works from three of Kozloff’s latest series, Uncivilized wars, Boys artAnd Social StudiesAre to see in the Map room at Argosy bookstore (116 East 59th Street, Upper East Side, Manhattan) through January 25, 2025.
Subscribe to Hyperallergic on Apple podcastsand wherever you listen to podcasts. Listen to the conversation along with images of the artworks on YouTube.
