BmoreArt

Cox’s family has lived in Maryland for centuries. The original founding name of the lineage was Tubman, and Cox spent months tracing down her huge family all the way back to England centuries ago. The result is the creation of a Tubman Family Tree which is included, along with family photographs, in a case set near a very large painting, “Family Totem.” 

“Family Totem” is a self-portrait of Cox with her spouse, Mare McCall and their daughter, Alexis, who peeks out of the tree. Both sweet and fierce, the child’s face is painted as a tigress from a visit to the zoo. Cox includes their three dogs, Freddy, Delilah, and Bronte. A close-up inspection of the tree limbs shows some of the names on her family tree, including Lord Baltimore, Sir Leonard Calvert, who is the artist’s 11th great grandfather and was the first colonial governor of Maryland. Thus far, she has traced the Calverts back to the 15th century in England.

The painting is huge, with life-size figures. Set in a garden landscape, it echoes the portraits of wealthy families like the Calverts, but the richness here is not a display of title or landownership but of the close relationship between three people and their pets.

Cox often employs photographic sketches. She uses vibrant colors and portrays dramatic, even theatrical lighting. The patterns on the blue dress were created by the artist and fit nicely into an overall composition of tree branches, flowers, and clothing, including the dogs’ fur. The artist explains that it’s a tree in their neighborhood that everyone climbs and she wanted the lines of names to look like bark.

“Duo Totem,” another large self-portrait with her wife, presents the bond they share through the arteries of heart and the brachia of lungs—blood pumping between them. It is based in part on Frida Kahlo’s 1939 self-portrait, “The Two Fridas.” Though Kahlo’s painting was a psychological study of the self, Cox uses the composition to depict the depth of her relationship with McCall. Cox is often inspired by the history of art, and reacts to its traditions, deconstructing the male gaze, and here, presenting images of two women together as whole and complete. She sets the figures in a lush and fertile landscape with water behind them, reminding us that love is not static or rigid.  

Another example of art historical references is seen in the large painting “Origin of the Family.” It centers Autumn pregnant, and Jane. The morning glories in the window were inspired by a Georgia O’Keeffe painting while the title of the painting is a play on Gustave Courbet’s 1866, “The Origin of the World,” an image that concentrates on the female sexual anatomy. Instead, Autumn’s extended belly is painted like a universe with swirling bright colors echoing her enlarged breasts. 

Cox wants to see images of people like her on museum walls. She depicts people she knows and meets, lesbian couples. Although she begins with photographs, taking as many as 300 to 500 or more for a single work, the image does not end up being a photographic likeness. In part, that is due to Cox’s sensitivity to bright colors and patterned fabrics. Two artists that Cox speaks about in terms having shaped her own vision are Egon Schiele for the relationship between figures in a composition and Xenia Hausner an Austrian/German painter who employs broad swaths of bright colors in her monumental figure studies.  

Jane and Autumn are also depicted “In the Garden of Autumn,” referring to the Garden of Eve, but now tomatoes grow, not the apple of Original Sin. The background is an ivy vine overlaid by a flowering plant called Sweet Autumn that forms a halo around Jane’s head. Cox’s love of pattern and color results in a dense paradise. 

An installation of a section of Cox’s living room with sofa, blankets, and coffee table, physically presents the setting for the painting “Night Hunger,” another double portrait that includes Mare. The domestic site contains two paintings on the walls, “Night Hunger” and “Falling into You (Again).” We are invited into their world, but it is clearly a private space that we can only enter temporarily. Here the patterns on the blankets tell a story. One checkered red and black, the other made of crocheted flowers—they play on the spectrum of gender norms while evoking comfort.

“Night Hunger” was chosen to be in the Portraits project by the Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington D.C. in June 2024, with original score, lyrics, and choreography, performed at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC. Cox was one of the nine visual artists chosen to be included in the project. The video of the performance is playing in the Center for the Arts gallery.

Cox was contacted by the photographer Morgan Lieberman who has been documenting senior lesbian partnerships across the US to see if Cox wanted to collaborate in some way. The result is a series of watercolor monoprints, and a huge painting based in part on Lieberman’s photographs. “Nanette & Dee” is an example of one of these works, centered on a photograph of Nanette Gartrell and Dee Mosbacher by Lieberman. Gartrell is an American psychiatrist, researcher, lesbian activist, and writer. Mosbacher is an American filmmaker, lesbian feminist activist, and practicing psychiatrist. 

Cox, who began as a watercolorist many years ago, returns in a slightly different format, to create ethereal images that deconstruct the concreteness of the photographs. The patterned fabrics that make up so much of Cox’s oil paintings remain but the figures float in a white space. A number of these works can be seen in the exhibition, smartly given their own section of the gallery.

The most monumental of the paintings in Side by Side is a large work of the same title of two well-known activists, Billie Parker and Gay Block, again based on a Lieberman photograph. Parker is retired and has been an activist, writer, corporate video producer, and currently serves as an addiction recovery teacher at the Santa Fe County Jail, New Mexico. Her wife, Block, is a well-known portrait photographer with work in numerous museum collections.

Cox is inspired by the photographs but gives her paintings and prints her own interpretation. She is accomplished at using photographs as initial “sketches;” not everyone is. Lieberman was right to contact Cox who both understands the subject and can make her own contribution. This large painting, installed on an intensely colored wall, is one of the most powerful works in the show.

We understand that these two women are comfortable in their lives and relationship. Cox retains some of the delicacy of the monoprints here with parts of the composition thinly painted and dripping. However, the women are solid, wearing the kind of strong colors we associate with the artist’s painted images. Their dog is included too, sitting to the right on the floor. The scene, staged and direct, references the ordinary of domesticity, a subject that has filled the canvases of artists in the history of art. But here Cox answers back to museums who have excluded LGBTQ+ subjects on their gallery walls. The exhibition, Side by Side, demonstrates that such visibility is not only powerful, but beautiful as well. 

Joan Cox: Side By Side is on view at Center for the Arts Gallery, Towson University June 14 – July 12 (closed July 4 & 5). The exhibition is one of many arts events taking place this summer as part of the COFAC Summer at the Center 2025.