Joan Cox: Side by Side at Towson University Center for the Arts presents works from Baltimore artist Joan Cox, who for over twenty-five years has explored the complexities of lesbian life and love across a range of media, from large oil paintings to light-and-shadow installations. This collection highlights the artist’s significant contributions to the genres of figurative painting and queer portraiture. The exhibition takes its title from a poem of the same name by Adrienne Rich, which describes a tender moment between lovers: “Ho! in the dawn / how light we lie / stirring faintly as laundry / left all night on the lines.” Like Rich’s verse, Cox’s paintings capture the quiet, often fleeting moments of intimacy between women, enlivened through the artist’s expressive brushstrokes and imaginative use of color.

Cox frequently draws her subjects from her immediate community, documenting a diversity of lesbian couples and the profound beauty of their quotidian intimacies. These intimate encounters, while sometimes sensual or erotic, are also domestic, mundane, and, above all, politically charged. Cox does not shy away from the political implications of her work. Instead, she embraces images of lesbian partnership as a tool for championing those who have often been overlooked in hegemonic histories of art and culture, and as a vehicle for reimagining social relations across difference.

A centerpiece of this exhibition is a series of recent collaborations with Los Angeles photographer Morgan Lieberman. Lieberman’s photographs of senior lesbian couples appear alongside Cox’s painterly reinterpretations, creating a rich visual dialogue across generations. Together, Cox and Lieberman pay tribute to these queer elders and give new meaning to the act of working and living “side by side.” Taking Cox’s dialogic approach to painting as a point of departure, Side by Side invites viewers to consider how these dual portraits offer layered insights into identity, intimacy, and relationality.