Joyce Kozloff’s ‘How We Know What We Know’ at Kohler Arts

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For me, the name Joyce Kozloff goes so far back that I can’t remember not knowing it. Her artwork came to me like a provision with the transition from drawing on notebook paper in high school to drawing on newsprint in art school. And I’m no spring chicken. Joyce Kozloff is about as stalwart as one will find in art world that accelerates and refreshes faster with each coming season. So it wasn’t too surprising to see her work at John Michael Kohler Center for the Arts as part of their “Work in Progress” series that will run through the year in celebration of 50 years of the Arts and Industry program. Kozloff’s contribution to this ambitious lookback at Kohler’s well-respected residency program is titled “How We Know What We Know,” and runs through June 30.   

Kozloff’s work is rooted in a rigorous visual vocabulary that she’s always marshalled toward social and political causes. The social and political part connects her to our moment; however, her strategies are a little more classic. Kozloff is less navel-out than today’s challengers to the status quo. That’s to say she’s more metaphorical, choosing to use related languages like maps and patterns as agents of lateral connectivity. Her exhibition at Kohler begins with an instructive breakdown of the project that initially drew her here in the first place: a commission for a large mural entitled D is for Detroit that she eventually completed during her Arts and Industry residency in 1986. Viewers are privy to a fascinating array of notes, sketches, and preliminary drawings. From there the exhibition offers us a small sample of what Kozloff produced in the years following the residency, presumably inspired and edified by her experiences therein. Kozloff will be known forever as a member of the almost-too-legendary Pattern and Decoration movement that subverted distinctions between high art and ornament as a critique of womens’ role in traditional visual production. Ever so ironically, the movement suffered both from its popularity and its beauty but not before influencing a great many artists in our contemporary art universe.

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Physically Engaging

The interactive sculpture Target stands out in the show. It’s the largest and most physically engaging of what’s on display at Kohler. It features a 9-foot-high inside-out globe that invites viewers inside to witness Kozloff’s creative cartography on its inside walls. The work stitches together 24 geographical sites from around the globe that have been bombed by the United States, from Laos to Guatemala. The encapsulating experience reflects on American hegemony over the last century. It brought the horrors of war, colonialism, paternalism, imperialism, and so many other isms into a strange new perspective for me. A perspective that sat with me long after the visit. 

I departed the Arts Center and took State Trunk Highway 23 west to Fond du Lac, to teach my standard Wednesday art history lineup. I watched America go by, farm-by-farm, like I was Nick Carraway, until I pulled into my familiar corner of the city. Across the street from the University is a house surfaced in hideous right-wing propaganda, ranging from sinister dares to take their guns, to invitations to “Buck Fiden.” No portion of the single-story-home-as-canvas is left blank. This unsettling vision bookended and fleshed-out an instructive story about America’s polarization in the time it took me to finish a Kwik Trip coffee and a Snickers bar. I stopped wondering long ago how we became so polarized as a society; now I’m just wondering how we became so predictable. There’s a point when the shape of the problem reveals more about its nature than the particulars within. And that’s when we need to take inventory. I’ll be in my office waiting for the nougat-ey middle of our troubled society to rise-up and surprise me with something that hasn’t already been hollered from the fringes.

Event Listings: March 5 – March 9, 2024

Milwaukee Public Library (Mitchell Street Branch)

  • AI Art
  • Tuesday, March 5, 5:30–7:30 p.m.

Lynden Sculpture Garden

  • A Community Café Conversation with Human Rights Education Specialist Elana Haviv
  • Wednesday, March 6, 12–1 p.m.

Charles Allis Museum of Art

  • Work from Home Wednesdays
  • Wednesday, March 6, 12–3 p.m.

Milwaukee Art Museum

  • Group Therapy (Women): Black Space at MAM
  • Wednesday, March 6, 5:30–7 p.m.

The Alice Wilds

  • Opening Reception: Shane Walsh, “Nights and Weekends”
  • Friday, March 8, 5–7 p.m.

Milwaukee Art Museum

  • Play Date with Art: Building Art
  • Friday, March 8, 10 a.m.–12 p.m.

MARN ART+CULTURE Hub

  • Opening reception: “But Soft, Sweet, and Dreamy” by Anna Rose Menako
  • Friday, March 8, 5–8 p.m.

Latino Arts

  • Opening Reception: “HOME GROWN: CULTIVADO AQUÍ”
  • Friday, March 8, 5:30 p.m.

Museum of Wisconsin Art (MOWA)

  • Second Saturdays
  • Saturday, March 9, 10 a.m.–2 p.m.

Milwaukee Art Museum

  • Drop-In Art Making: Kohl’s Art Studio
  • Saturday, March 9, 10 a.m.–4 p.m.

Milwaukee Art Museum

  • Story Time in the Galleries
  • Saturday, March 9, 10:30–11 a.m.

Milwaukee Art Museum

  • Slow Art Saturday: “50 Paintings”
  • Saturday, March 9, 10:30–11:30 a.m.

Milwaukee Art Museum

  • Drop-In Tour: Celebrating Women Artists
  • Saturday, March 9, 2–3 p.m.

MARN ART+CULTURE Hub

  • “It hurts now like it did then”
  • Saturday, March 9, 5–7 p.m.

Saint Kate – The Arts Hotel

  • AIR Time, Art & Studio Tour with AIR Anwar Floyd-Pruitt
  • Saturday, March 9, 6:30 p.m.