The thing about minimalism is that it always felt like a dare—like someone bet the art world it couldn’t survive on white walls and industrial materials alone.
By the mid-1970s, that dare had turned into dogma, and if you walked through any serious gallery in SoHo or Chelsea, you’d encounter the same stripped-down aesthetic: Donald Judd’s stacked boxes, Carl Andre’s floor plates, Agnes Martin’s grids that practically hummed with restraint. I used to think this austerity represented some kind of ultimate truth about art, that less really was more, that decoration was somehow dishonest. Then I learned about the Pattern and Decoration movement—or P&D, as insiders called it—and realized that a whole generation of artists had looked at minimalism’s cold perfection and thought, honestly, this is kind of exhausting. They wanted color back, wanted ornamentation, wanted to pull from Islamic tilework and quilting traditions and wallpaper patterns that modernism had spent decades trying to erase. The movement started informally around 1975, when artists like Joyce Kozloff, Miriam Schapiro, and Robert Kushner began showing work that was—and there’s no polite way to say this—aggressively decorative. Maximalist. Unapologetically pretty.
Anyway, the critical establishment didn’t exactly recieve them with open arms. Reviews from the late ’70s read like eulogy-level dismissals: decoration wasn’t serious, wasn’t intellectual, wasn’t even really art in the way minimalism had supposedly perfected it. But here’s the thing—P&D artists weren’t just rebelling against minimalism’s aesthetic; they were challenging its entire ideological framework.
When Wallpaper Became a Radical Statement About Gender and Craft
Miriam Schapiro’s “femmages”—a term she coined by smashing “female” and “collage” together—incorporated fabric, lace, and embroidery into large-scale paintings. These weren’t demure domestic crafts tucked away in living rooms; they were monumental works that demanded gallery space and serious attention. Schapiro once said she wanted to honor the “hidden” artists—mostly women—who’d spent centuries making quilts and samplers that never made it into museums. I guess it makes sense that the movement attracted feminist artists, because decoration had always been gendered, always been dismissed as “women’s work.” By the late 1970s, artists like Valerie Jaudon and Tina Girouard were creating enormous canvases covered in interlocking geometric patterns pulled from Celtic knots, Moorish mosaics, and Native American textiles. Critics called it “mere” decoration, but that “mere” was doing a lot of ideological work—wait, maybe that was the point? If minimalism represented a masculine, Western, industrial aesthetic, then P&D was deliberately everything it wasn’t: feminine, global, handmade, historically rooted in traditions modernism had tried to erase.
The Movement’s Quiet Theft From Islamic Art and Non-Western Traditions
Joyce Kozloff traveled to Mexico, Morocco, and Turkey in the mid-’70s, photographing tile patterns and architectural details that she’d later translate into sprawling installations. Her 1979 piece “An Interior Decorated” covered entire walls with hand-painted ceramic tiles mimicking Islamic geometric designs. Some critics accused the movement of cultural appropriation—and honestly, they weren’t entirely wrong. P&D artists borrowed heavily from non-Western decorative traditions, often without the kind of contextual engagement we’d expect today. But they were also trying to challenge the Western canon’s hierarchy, to argue that a Turkish rug or a Mexican pottery pattern had as much artistic merit as a Barnett Newman zip painting.
Turns out, that argument was harder to win than they expected.
Why Museums Took Thirty Years to Actually Display These Works
The Pattern and Decoration movement had its moment—roughly between 1975 and 1985, give or take—and then it sort of vanished. Not literally; the artists kept working, kept exhibiting, but the broader art world moved on to neo-expressionism, then appropriation art, then whatever came next. Major museums didn’t mount significant P&D retrospectives until the 2000s. The Museum of Modern Art in New York didn’t seriously engage with the movement until a 2007 exhibition that felt, at least to me, like a reluctant acknowledgment rather than a celebration. Part of the problem was that P&D never fit neatly into art history’s narratives: it wasn’t postmodern enough to align with the ’80s appropriation crowd, wasn’t conceptual enough to satisfy critics who valued ideas over aesthetics. And it definately wasn’t minimal.
How Contemporary Design Finally Caught Up to What P&D Was Saying in 1975
Walk into any trendy boutique hotel or design-forward apartment today, and you’ll see P&D’s influence everywhere: maximalist wallpapers, bold geometric tiles, textiles that reference global craft traditions. Instagram’s aesthetic economy loves pattern, loves color, loves decoration in ways that would’ve been unthinkable during minimalism’s reign. Companies like Fornasetti and Jonathan Adler built entire brands on ornamental excess. I’ve seen design blogs describe this as “eclectic” or “bohemian,” rarely acknowledging that a group of artists in the 1970s were making these exact arguments—that decoration wasn’t frivolous, that pattern carried meaning, that craft traditions deserved the same respect as fine art. The art market’s caught up too: Kozloff’s tile installations and Schapiro’s femmages now sell for six figures, and younger artists like Sanford Biggers and Mickalene Thomas cite P&D as a direct influence.
Maybe minimalism wasn’t the final word on art after all. Maybe it was just one aesthetic choice among many, and P&D reminded us that restraint isn’t inherently more honest than abundance, that a Turkish tile can hold as much meaning as a steel cube, that the stuff modernism called “decorative”—and therefore lesser—was actually just art it didn’t know how to categorize yet.
