About Joyce Blumberg Kozloff

Born in Somerville, New Jersey, Joyce Kozloff is known for paintings with flat, colorful, abstract patterning and for repetitive geometric forms that produce strong variations of line, shape, and color. Her work is intended to be purely decorative and pleasureable and not tied to any particular culture. In the 1980s, she did numerous site-specific works with tiles and mosaics including the "New England Decorative Arts" for the Harvard Square Subway Station in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and two works for One Penn Plaza in Philadelphia.

A later project involved a series of thirty-two watercolors, each twenty-two inches square titled Patterns of Desire.

Kozloff earned her BFA degree at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh in 1964, and her MFA from Columbia University in 1967. She also studied at the Art Students League in New York City; Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey' and the University of Florence in Italy.

She has held teaching positions including elementary, high school and college classes. Her first one-person show was in New York in 1970 at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery. It was during this time, she began her pattern pieces, which were initially inspired by the decoration she saw on Mexican Cathedrals.

Source:
Lee Karpiscak, North American Women Artists of the Twentieth Century, edited by Jules and Nancy G Heller.