For Joan Cox (b. 1969), painting is a way to render tenderness, queer love, and personal memories visible and eternal. Based in Baltimore, Cox has spent over two decades making the intimate lives of lesbian couples visible on canvas. Her vivid colors, energetic brushwork, and layered symbolism weave together personal experience with broader political and emotional truths.
Growing up when LGBTQ+ identities were often marginalized, Cox turned to painting, photography, graphic design, and writing to express what mainstream culture rendered invisible. In 2005, she and her wife moved to New Orleans and opened Moxy Studios on Magazine Street. After Hurricane Katrina, Cox stayed for two years, running her gallery and supporting local artists as they rebuilt their community.
In 2007, Cox returned to the East Coast to pursue graduate studies in Provincetown, MA, where she found the courage to fully embrace and express her LGBTQ+ identity through art. Her portraits of lesbian couples celebrate the richness and complexity of queer narratives.
Cox holds a BFA from Towson University and an MFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design’s Low-Residency program in Provincetown. Her recent solo exhibition, “Side by Side,” was held at Towson University in June 2025. She also exhibited at the inaugural “Immortal 25” queer art fair in Mexico City. Her work has received international recognition, including 2nd Place in the Women United International Art Prize and selection as one of the VAA100 Top International Artists in 2025.
Statement
The materiality and sensuality of paint has always seduced me, but my process usually starts with a photographic source. I take photographic portraits of couples, often in a constructed pose that I have mined from an existing painting or photograph. With this process, I enter into dialogue with artists who have come before me by appropriating compositional elements of their works. I choose paintings or photographs that depict male/female couples and replace both figures with women, although some of the women are very androgynous looking. Blurring the lines between female and male identities makes gender distinctions more ambiguous and challenges viewers’ expectations. Viewers may approach a painting assuming to see a male/female couple because couples are typically defined as male/female or because they recognize the composition. Only on closer inspection do the two female forms reveal themselves.
My work opens up a dialogue about the increasingly open presence of lesbian couples in contemporary society and the lack of their presence in the history of Western art. I use narrative, historical art references and autobiography to depict taboo intimacies between women—acknowledging and emphasizing the female gaze.
Because the lesbian perspective has been denied so long in painting, I strive to validate the presence of dynamic, complex, sensual, sexual and loving relationships between women—making them less taboo. I create paintings that I wish I could have seen growing up; realities that echo my own and let me know that I am not only valid but can also find joy and acceptance.
These lush narrative paintings, layered with colorful fabrics, patterns and nature present the viewer with richly symbolic images of intimate relationships between two women, acknowledging and emphasizing the female gaze. I draw on my own life with my partner of twenty-one years as well as the intimate lives of lesbian couples in my community to build visual narratives that champion our undeniably intense, complex, celebratory and (still) taboo relationships.