Animating cartography: Joyce Kozloff’s histories

In this article commission Peggy Phelan examines the recent work of Joyce Kozloff (b.1942), focusing on her engagement with maps, craft and history. Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Kozloff completed Uncivil Wars (2020–23), a series of thirteen acrylic paintings based on battle maps from the American Civil War, and Memory and Time: Labor and Cultural History (2021), a commission for the Federal Courthouse in Greenville, South Carolina. The latter combines aerial maps, Cherokee basket patterns and historical quilts to interrogate the politics of labour, slavery and memory, highlighting the legacies of Native American histories alongside the rise of the southern textile industry. Kozloff’s practice, emerging from the Pattern and Decoration movement and informed by decades of public art, conceptual rigour and feminist engagement, treats maps as platforms for both historical documentation and speculative imagination. Her work challenges viewers to reconsider historical narratives, power and the implications of visual representation.