Justine Kurland

Osmos is pleased to present Justine Kurland: A Retrospective, the first ever survey exhibition of Justine Kurland’s work, spanning three decades. Justine Kurland’s work reflects an idyllic yet wild America through a queer feminist lens. This is the first ever retrospective exhibition for the artist and her first solo show with Osmos in New York City. The photographs and collages on view are a curation of selected work from disparate series which presents a constellation of enduring themes.

Kurland’s earliest series in the exhibition, Girl Pictures (1997-2002), crafts a world of teenage girls empowering each other through exploration, make-believe, and intimacy. As Kurland writes, the idea was to stage “photographs of teenage girls imagining they had run away from home and formed community together on the fringes of cities and suburbs. […] I intended for them to playact a state of communal bliss. As it turned out, the girls didn’t have to pretend.” Kurland’s next three series on view continue to explore our interdependence on one another and the landscape: In Community, Sky Blue (2001-2004) features group portraits of present-day communes; In Renaissance Fairs (2003-2004) Kurland returns to a circuit of fairs were her mother sold handcrafted clothing and stages portraits with the reenactors; and Of Woman Born (2005-2007), is a series of naked women and babies in vast natural settings.

Kurland’s work draws from autobiography -- the road trip being an inheritance from her mother, an itinerant vendor who traveled with her two daughters to Renaissance Fairs across the country. Similarly, Kurland lived on the road for eight months of the year with her child, from age six-months to six years and again every summer until he turned eleven. They traveled from rural New York to the suburbs of Tacoma, to New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward, making pictures of the landscapes she encountered and the people she met. The “observations” in Highway Kind (2006-2015), which reflect the violent idealization of westward expansion and economic downturn in the United States, are presented alongside pictures of the mechanics who kept her vehicle on the road. Within this body of work is a separate and focused series entitled This Train (2006-2010), which Kurland describes as “an album of a queer itinerant single mother and son, expanding the notion of what family might look like.”

Renouncing her participation in American road trip photography in 2016, Kurland’s work entitled The Stick is a reflection on her father’s death through the concepts of home, motherhood, and queer intimacy. These black-and-white silver gelatin prints feature family members showing themselves affirmatively and without pretense in three domestic spaces that have been home to the artist.

Kurland’s recent series Scumb Manifesto [Society for Cutting Up Men’s Books], which she began in 2019, continues to reimagine documentations of women through a feminist strategy of collage, made with cut-up photobooks by white male photographers. While collage seems to be the biggest departure from her earlier work, it remains consistent with Kurland’s speculative vision that photography can make and unmake us.

Justine Kurland (b. 1969, New York) is an artist known for her utopian photographs of American landscapes and the fringe communities, both real and imagined, that inhabit them. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; the Getty Museum, Los Angeles, California; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal, among others. She has an upcoming solo museum exhibition at the Birchfield Penney Art Center, Buffalo, NY, in 2027.