NEW YORK, NY.- The French Institute Alliance Française, New York's premiere French cultural center, presents Social Studies by Joyce Kozloff, an installation of mixed media work on view at the FIAF Gallery from Wednesday, February 25 through Saturday, April 25, 2015.

A founding member of the Pattern and Decoration movement of the 1970s, Kozloff has been using maps and globes to explore issues of social and political injustice for over two decades. With artistic practices including photography, collage, sculpture, and printmaking, Kozloff has employed a wide range of cartographic styles in her work, from renaissance cosmological charts to aeronautical maps used in warfare.

While at the Clignancourt flea market in Paris, Kozloff discovered a collection of vintage maps used in French schools during the 1950s. Featuring mid-century typography and design, the maps depict landforms, agricultural products, and farm animals, and represent many now archaic names and borders of places.

After living with them for a year, Kozloff began digitally layering new images, colors, and text onto scans of the maps. She later developed the physical surfaces and added more individualized content to the prints with paint and collage. Colorful, commanding, and detailed, the resulting maps tell histories not taught in classrooms.

Prints for this series were made with Fran Flaherty at the Digital Art Studio, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh; additional prints were produced at the Advanced Media Studio, NYU with Morgan R. Levy.

DC Moore Gallery will open Joyce Kozloff: Maps & Patterns on March 26. This exhibition of new mixed media work synthesizes Kozloff’s interest in the meaning of maps with the forms of the Pattern and Decoration painting she pioneered in the 1970s.

Spurred by recent travel along the silk route, Kozloff has returned for the first time to the Islamic star patterns that structured her early art. A group of works titled If I Were a Botanist and If I Were an Astronomer revisit two artist books Kozloff made in 1977, in which she manipulated the black-and-white diagrams in Islamic geometry books to create kaleidoscopic compositions saturated with color. In characteristic defiance of the hierarchies of high and low, Kozloff considered this work to be “a cross between coloring books and illuminated manuscripts.”