Joyce Kozloff, Rocking the Cradle, 2003, cradle with acrylic, 56 x 27 x 30 1/2 inches,

Cradles to Conquests at Rowan University Art Gallery, January 21st through March 15th, 2014. Rowan University Art Gallery is located on the lower level of Westby Hall on the university campus, Route 322 in Glassboro, NJ.

GLASSBORO, NJ – Joyce Kozloff, a New Jersey native and a major figure in both the Pattern and Decoration and the Feminist art movements of the 1970s, debuts her solo exhibition in New Jersey at Rowan University Art Gallery. Running from January 21 through March 15, the exhibition is welcomed with a gallery talk by the artist and reception on Wednesday, January 29th at 5:00 pm.

Cradles to Conquests: Mapping American Military History is a selection of Kozloff’s work completed between 2000 and 2010 that reference imagined and historical military events.

The works utilize collage, cartography and mapping as a narrative extension of Joyce’s decorative arts sensibilities and her work as a feminist and anti-war activist.  Ironically, Kozloff’s mapping series makes use of a practice once widely viewed as “gender-specific” —appliqué, weaving, pattern, decorative — to challenge and question the authority of a patriarchal, militaristic culture.

Curated by gallery director Mary Salvante, the works selected for this exhibition focuses directly on maps and imagery that dramatize the emergence of the US through the lens of its military engagements and exploits in the name of expansion and national interests.  The exhibition features several of Kozloff’s iconic pieces such as Targets, a walk in globe that utilizes official tactical pilotage charts in which to depicts all of the US bombing sites around the world since 1945, Boys Art Series, which collages innocent, youthful drawing done by the artist’s son with nautical maps, and Rocking the Cradle, a larger than life size baby cradle with a map of Mesopotamia, the seat of cultivation, and to this day a very sensitive location politically.

Joyce Kozloff began to focus on public art in 1979. She expanded the scale of her installations and the accessibility of her art to reach a wider audience and, since the early 1990s, has been utilizing mapping as a device for expressing her interests in history, culture, politics and the decorative and popular arts. She has had solo exhibitions at the DC Moore Gallery in New York; Trout Gallery at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania; Spazio Thetis in Venice, Italy; and Regina Gouger Miller Gallery of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, National Museum of Women in the Arts, MoMA P.S.1, Vancouver Art Gallery and The Jewish Museum in New York. Recently, her work was included in the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art’s The Map as Art.

 The works included in the exhibition are courtesy of the artist and DC Moore Gallery and several private collectors.

This program is made possible in part by funds from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.

Admission to the gallery, lecture and reception is free and open to the public. Regular gallery hours are Monday – Friday, 10 am to 5 pm (with extended hours on Wednesdays to 7 pm); and Saturday, 12 to 5 pm. For more information, call 856-256-4521 or visit www.rowan.edu/artgallery.

Thank you to Mary Salvante for this DoNArTNeWs blog post.

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