[10] Beginning in 1973, wishing to break down the western hierarchy between "high art" and decoration, Kozloff created large paintings, drawing upon worldwide patterns, juxtaposing ornamental passages across an expansive field.
[12] During the late 1970s, she produced An Interior Decorated, a travelling installation composed of hanging silkscreen textile panels; hand painted, glazed tile pilasters; lithographs on Chinese silk paper; and a tiled floor composed of thousands of individually executed images on interlocking stars and hexagons.
Just as her paintings had nonwestern origins, for this installation, she compiled a personal, visual anthology of the decorative arts from dozens of sources, including Caucasian kilims, İznik and Catalan tiles, Seljuk brickwork, and Native American pottery.
Her initial large scale pieces were composed of interlocking patterns of glass mosaic and/or ceramic tiles, an extension of her earlier gallery art.
For instance, at the Suburban Station in Philadelphia, she substituted an image of William Penn for the Good Shepherd in an appropriation of the Byzantine Tomb of Galla Placidia in Ravenna.
[24] In the late 1980s she produced a series of 32 watercolors entitled Patterns of Desire—Pornament is Crime, published by Hudson Hills Press in 1990 with an introductory essay by Linda Nochlin.
[30] Kozloff has utilized mapping since the early 1990s as a structure for her long-time passions - history, geography, popular arts and culture.
In her series Knowledge (1998–1999), consisting of 65 small (8 x 10") frescoes and six tabletop globes, she depicted the inaccuracies of maps from earlier times, particularly during the Age of Discovery, to reveal the arbitrary nature of what can be known.
[31] In 1999–2000, during Kozloff’s year-long fellowship at the American Academy in Rome, she executed Targets, a walk-in globe 9 feet (2.7 m) in diameter made of 24 gore-shaped sections.
She painted an aerial map on the inside surface of each section to depict a site bombed by the United States military between the years 1945 and 2000.
[34] For several years, Kozloff worked on a huge installation about the history of western colonialism, shown at Thetis in the Venice Arsenale (2006), Voyages + Targets.
Beginning in 2006, Kozloff’s ongoing tondi (round paintings) began with Renaissance cosmological charts crisscrossed by the tracks of satellites in space,[35] an imaginary projection of future (star) wars (the days and hours and moments of our lives, Helium on the Moon, Revolver).
[36] "Descartes' Heart" is based on the heart-shaped map, Cosmographia universalis ab Orontio olin descripta, by Renaissance cartographer Giovanni Cimerlino (Verona, 1566).
The tondi were followed by an 18-foot (5.5 m)-long triptych, The Middle East: Three Views (2010), a projection of the contested areas in that region during the Roman era, the Cold War, and currently.
[citation needed] In 2011-2012, Kozloff completed JEEZ, a 12’ x 12’ painting based on the Ebstorf map, a 13th - century circular mappa mundi.
[37] Its companion, The Tempest, was completed in 2014, a 10’ x 10’ work based on a Chinese 18th century world map, in which the Great Wall traverses the upper levels and turbulent seas surround the land mass.
Viruses erupt throughout the maps, reflecting the pandemic that locked down state, national, and international borders - and symbolizing the viral racism and xenophobia that permeate our country.
[40][41] Her art is in numerous museum collections, including: Kozloff has had group and solo exhibitions since 1970 in many US cities, including New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Washington, DC[64][65][66][67] She had a traveling exhibition with her husband Max, "Crossed Purposes", that started in Youngstown, Ohio and traveled to eight other museums and university galleries in the US from 1998 to 2000.