TitleJodhpur Blue: Vietnamese
Artist
Joyce Kozloff
(American, b. 1942)
Date1997 (frame 1981)
MediumCast paper and plaster on wood, watercolor on silk, india ink and collage on paper, frame with enamel paint
DimensionsFramed: 34 × 34 1/8 × 1 1/4 in.
Unframed: 31 3/4 × 32 in.
SignedSigned on reverse in black marker at bottom right: "Joyce Kozloff / 1981-1997".
SubmissionNA diploma presentation, March 19, 2003
Credit LineNational Academy of Design, New York, NY
Object number2003.5
Label TextJoyce Kozloff was one of a number of artists who, in the early 1970s, began drawing inspiration from various non-Western sources and the vernacular decorative tradition as part of the Pattern and Decoration movement. Along with other seminal Pattern and Decoration artists such as Cynthia Carlson, Valerie Jaudon, Robert Kushner, Kim MacConnel, Miriam Schapiro, Robert Zakanitch, and others, the artists' work often combined an interest in feminist issues with a response to the hegemonic austerity of Minimalism. For Kozloff, the processes of craft played an important role in her work and "Jodhpur Blue: Vietnamese" incorporates the various techniques of enamel paint, cast paper and plaster, watercolor, india ink, and collage.This work is part of a series of eight works that Kozloff created after a 1996 trip to Jodhpur, India, where she admired the "memorably vibrant blue houses and niches for ritual offerings, an everyday aspect of the clamorous Rajasthani street life." The works in the series combine images of food, maps of cities, recipes, and details of faces taken from movie stills, and contain multicultural cross references (for example pictures of foods from one culture juxtaposed with recipes from another). This particular work is named after the Vietnamese food it encloses. Kozloff, an adventurous cook, copied the foods from her own cookbooks using watercolor on silk, a technique she discovered in Vietnam. The artist stated: "An ensemble like 'Jodhpur Blue,' which admittedly has more in it than most people want to see, reflects my experience of the world."
