Wednesday, November 5, 2025

Joyce Kozloff: Contested Territories, 1983-2023
Everson Museum of Art

Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

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.