For more than four decades, Joyce Kozloff has explored how the entanglements of geography, history, and power influence the visual language of maps. Contested Territories presents a selection of Kozloff’s works that uncover how maps shape our understanding of the world—not as neutral tools, but as instruments of influence, ideology, and control.
Kozloff’s wide range of sources include historical maps, classroom wall maps, atlases, globes, and even satellite imagery from Google Maps. Her dense and colorful works often layer these materials with hand-painted details, collage, and intricate ornamentation. By combining sources that span centuries—from Renaissance celestial charts to contemporary digital mapping—she exposes how maps carry the legacies of empire, conflict, and shifting territorial claims.
A founding figure in the Pattern and Decoration movement, Kozloff combines meticulous craftsmanship with political critique. Her works are labor-intensive, involving the detailed process of painting, drawing, and collaging over cartographic surfaces. The resulting richly textured visual field invites viewers to look closely—and to question the conquest, division, and erasure found beneath the official surface narrative.
Whether reimagining educational globes or deconstructing colonial-era charts, Kozloff transforms maps from static documents into contested, dynamic spaces. Her work encourages viewers to reconsider how borders are drawn as well as how art can reclaim such boundaries as sites of resistance, memory, and possibility.
Virtual Reality Experience
A fully immersive virtual reality experience of Kozloff’s newest public artwork, developed by Brooklyn-based MediaCombo, accompanies the exhibition. Using VR headsets, visitors can explore Memory and Time, a series of 17 glass and mosaic tile panels illustrating the history of Greenville’s textile industry, installed at the Carroll A. Campbell Jr. United States Courthouse in Greenville, South Carolina. Kozloff herself narratives the 9-minute experience, guiding visitors through several panels and describing how they represent local history.
Joyce Kozloff
Tigray Ethiopia Eritrea, 2022-23
Acrylic on canvas, 60 x 60 inches
Courtesy of the artist and DC Moore Gallery, New York
Joyce Kozloff
JEEZ, 2012
Acrylic on panel, 144 x 144 inches
Courtesy of the artist and DC Moore Gallery, New York
Joyce Kozloff
Knowledge #76: 1602, 1999
Watercolor, acrylic, plaster and rope on cardboard with
porcelain base, 9 11/16 inches diameter
Courtesy of the artist and DC Moore Gallery, New York
Joyce Kozloff: Contested Territories, 1983-2023 is made possible with support from the National Endowment for the Arts. The Everson is supported by the Dorothy and Marshall M. Reisman Foundation; the General Operating Support program, a regrant program of the County of Onondaga with the support of County Executive, J. Ryan McMahon II, and the Onondaga County Legislature, administered by CNY Arts; and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.
About the Artist:
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.
