Language is the focal point of Schulze’s artwork. She incorporates graphic dialectics that act as a visual grammar. The words may be explicit, as in The Writer’s Room(2014), announcing a theme or motif. The viewer is first drawn to the gallery of images that evoke a locale for creation and the misgivings of the writing process itself. The split image of introspection and frustration depicted in lines one and two relate to the text on the right. This language identifies the theme of the work and the values that drive the writer in her craft….

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A review of  Poetic License, published in 2010 by Suzanne Smith Arney .The retrospective, Poetic License: The Art of Joan Schulze, is accompanied by a hardcover book/catalog of the same title. In the introductory essay, “Looking back a decade,” Schulze writes, “A series, a stand-alone work, or the occasional experiment relates to all that has gone before.” This is true of four decades as much as one. Her reputation as a collagist attests to this belief in the power and value of cumulative understanding. It is a credo based on experiences and inherent disposition. Fabric used in one quilt reappears years later in another, an homage to her mother’s scrap coverlets; an early quilt may be reworked as a deeper meaning becomes clear; collages best represent the imperfect, subjective, fragmented, and fugitive makeup of our lives…

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