Justine Kurland
Thursday, October 11
Prentis 101
6:30pm
Justine Kurland, known for her utopian photographs of American landscapes and their fringe communities, has spent the better part of the last twenty years on the road. Following in the photographic lineage of Robert Frank, Stephen Shore, and Joel Sternfeld, Kurland’s work examines the story of America—and the idea of the American dream juxtaposed against the reality. Since 2004, Kurland and her young son, Casper, have traveled in their customized van, going south in the winter and north in the summer, her life as an artist finely balanced between the demands of a parent and the demands of her work. Casper appears at different ages in the photographs, against open vistas and among the subcultures of train-hoppers and drifters around them. Kurland’s vision is in equal parts raw and romantic, idyllic and dystopian.
Recent work departs from the road trips she is known for and returns home: her apartment in New York City, her hometown of Fulton, New York, and her mother’s home in rural Virginia. Kurland invaginates fragments of this life (her cat, lovers, a bloodied tampon) with allusions to a matrilineage including Carolee Schneemann, Betty Tompkins, Judy Chicago, Hannah Wilke, and Emily Roysdon.
Justine Kurland (born in Warsaw, New York, 1969) received her BFA from the School of Visual Arts and her MFA from Yale University. Her work has been exhibited extensively at museums in the United States and internationally. Recent museum exhibitions include The Open Road at the Detroit Institute of Art, Detroit, Michigan; More American Photographs, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio; and Off the Grid #1 and #2, Fotodok, the Netherlands. She was the focus of a solo exhibition at Mitchell-Innes and Nash this spring and a two-person exhibition at Higher Pictures this summer, both in New York City. Her work is in the public collections of institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, Guggenheim Museum, and International Center of Photography, New York, as well as the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, among others.
Justine Kurland in Conversation with Her Son, Casper (via Aperture)
Justine Kurland for the New York Times Magazine
Justine Kurland in the New Yorker
