ABSTRACT
In their search for new form and content, artists turned to the crafts and decoration. Feminists led the way because handicrafted decoration had historically been women's work—or, as feminists insisted, art—and they sought, as Miriam Schapiro commented, to have their "art speak as a woman speaks." Like modernists, many pattern and decoration painters, notably feminists, did make extra-aesthetic claims for their work. Pattern and decoration painters not only had to rebut the attack on their work because it was decorative but also because it was painting. Minimal and postminimal artists and their advocates had waged a polemical war against painting, with considerable success. The new decorative painters also looked to the fabrics, kitchen utensils, clothing, and architecture designed by the Russian constructivists and suprematists. In 1974 Joyce Kozloff became interested in Islamic patterns and in the following year took a trip to Morocco, where she studied mosque architecture and ornament, paying attention to how the two were integrated.
