Joan Cox
Joan Cox (born 1969) is a figurative painter who focuses on painting intimate relationships between women. Images of female couples are typically repressed, hidden, or explained as erotic material for the male gaze. Working in large-scale figurative painting, Cox adheres to the notion that representation matters. She seeks to portray dynamic, complex, sensual, sexual, and loving relationships between women—normalizing them. Paintings of women in intimate settings celebrate the female gaze while they intentionally subvert the male gaze by having the two engaged with each other and not reclining sleepily for viewers’ consumption. Often Cox paints one of the figures as androgynous, as if challenging viewers to look more closely and recognize that these are lesbians, and not heterosexual couples.
While her subjects are generally friends and family, even an occasional self-portrait, the figures are often placed in settings that nod to art historical precedents in an effort to supply the canon with images of lesbian love that have been clearly missing until now. Because the lesbian perspective has been denied for so long in painting, Cox’s socially relevant paintings open up that dialogue through a complex investigation of cultural norms, sexual identity, and body politics.
Based in Baltimore, Maryland, Cox is a painter and photographer, as well as a graphic designer and writer. She earned a BFA from Towson University and an MFA from Massachusetts College of Art's program at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Her work has been shown nationally and can be found in a host of private collections.
