Crossed Purposes: Joyce and Max Kozloff

Polk Museum of Art

Lakeland, FL

941-688-7743

http://www.polkmuseumofart.org/

Crossed Purposes: Joyce and Max Kozloff

Crossed Purposes: Joyce and Max Kozloff will be on exhibit in the Polk Museum of Art's Gallery I and II October 16 through December 5, 1999.

Crossed Purposes is the first formal joint exhibition of the artworks of Joyce and Max Kozloff. The exhibition has been organized by The Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, OH and by Joyce and Max Kozloff. Joyce's mixed media painted works incorporates maps and decorative patterns of color and Max's color photographs of street and carnival scenes from throughout the world describe in different ways the experience of the post-modern world. Their styles and vibrant use of color combines elements from apparently disconnected sources and brings in powerful and beautiful visual forms. Their use of intense colors, playful patterns, and rich textures unites both the disparate imagery used by each and the two artists themselves.

Joyce Kozloff is a major figure in the Pattern and Decoration movement of the 1970s. She received a B.A from Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh and an M.F.A. from Columbia University. For a period of nearly 20 twenty years, she used 14 public art commissions to expand both the scale and accessibility of her work. She is featured in nearly every survey of late 20th century art or of women artists including Whitney Chadwick's Women, Art and Society, Daniel Wheeler's Art Since Mid-Century: 1945-Present, and Irving Sandler's Art of the Postmodern Era. Her paintings are included in the collections of the National Gallery of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Museum of Modern Art, and the Library of Congress.

Max Kozloff has been an important figure in art criticism for four decades. He received a B.A. from the University of Chicago and an M.A. in art history from University of Chicago. After completing his M.A., he also studied at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University from 1959-63. He was a writer for The Nation from 1961-68, Associate, Contributing, and Executive Editor of Artforum from 1963-76, and is the author of 9 books. He has received a Pulitzer Fellowship for Critical Writing, a Fulbright Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship for Critical Writing, and NEA Grants for Art Criticism and Critical Writing. Since 1977 he has had over a dozen solo exhibitions of his photography and has participated in group exhibitions across the country and internationally including Switzerland, Germany, France, Cuba, and England. (left: Max Kozloff, Festival of Holi, Bijaapur, India, 1991, chromogenic print)

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This page was originally published in 1999 in Resource Library Magazine. Please see Resource Library's Overview section for more information.