Sing-Along American History: War and Race

2004

This powerful commentary on the history of war and race in America is from a series of nine mixed-media collages that the artist Joyce Kozloff calls “a kind of personal, quirky history of America.” The current invasion of Iraq was the emotional catalyst for this work, which portrays a trail of geopolitical conflicts. This piece, the fifth in the series, is composed of appropriated imagery, including musical notes and song lyrics taken from 1920s game boards given to the artist by her mother. It depicts laboring slaves as well as Civil War soldiers, languid antebellum women, cotton fields, steamships, trains, churches, and other period structures. Words from slave songs and Bible hymns, and texts about “The War of Independence,” the Mason and Dixon Line, and Gettysburg are dispersed throughout the work.