Joan Cox
MFA ’13 Fine Arts Low-Residency
My recent exhibition Side by Side brought together new paintings exploring lesbian life, love, and intimacy—subjects I’ve been committed to for over twenty-five years. Working in oil and across other media, I aim to capture the quiet, often fleeting moments shared between women: domestic, sensual, political. These everyday gestures—resting, touching, gazing—carry profound emotional and cultural weight, especially in a world where queer relationships have so often been erased.
The exhibition drew its title from Adrienne Rich’s poem Side by Side, whose tender imagery mirrors the themes in my work. I paint from life and from my community, documenting lesbian couples in ways that both honor their presence and push back against the limitations of dominant narratives in art history.
A centerpiece of the show was my recent collaboration with photographer Morgan Lieberman, pairing her portraits of elder lesbian couples with my painterly reinterpretations. Together, we created an intergenerational conversation about visibility, care, and the power of living and creating side by side.
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Joan Cox (born 1969) is a figurative painter who focuses on painting intimate relationships between women. Growing up in Baltimore, Maryland, Joan navigated her formative years during a time when LGBTQ+ identities were marginalized and silenced. During this time, she explored various mediums, including painting, photography, graphic design, and writing. In Spring of 2005, she and her wife moved to New Orleans and opened an art gallery on Magazine Street and then Hurricane Katrina struck. She stayed in NOLA for two years, operating her gallery, Moxy Studios, and fostering community while fighting for the return of prosperity for local artists. In 2007 she returned to the East coast, and attended graduate school in Provincetown, MA where she found the courage to openly express her own LGBTQ+ identity in her paintings of lesbian couples—portraits that encompass rich queer narratives.
She earned a BFA from Towson University and an MFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design’s Low-Residency program in Provincetown. She most recently had a solo exhibition titled, “Side by Side”, at her alma mater—Towson University—in June 2025.
