Justine Kurland (b. 1969, New York)
Justine Kurland is an artist known for her utopian photographs of American landscapes and the fringe communities, both real and imagined, that inhabit them. Her early work comprises photographs, taken during many cross-country road trips, that counter the masculinist mythology of the American landscape, offering a radical female imaginary in its place. Her recent series of collages, SCUMB Manifesto, continues to make space for women by transforming books by canonized male photographers through destruction and reparation.
Kurland’s work has been exhibited at museums and galleries in the United States and abroad. Her work is included in permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Carnegie Museum, Pennsylvania; Getty Museum, California; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal, among others. She works with Higher Pictures in New York.
Last Resort, 2022
Collage on paper
Selected Exhibitions
The Center for Photography at Woodstock
Widening the Lens: Photography, Ecology, and the Contemporary Landscape
National Museum of Women in the Arts
Widening the Lens: Photography, Ecology, and the Contemporary Landscape
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA
Justine Kurland: This Train, 2005-2011
Selected Press
Pamela Sneed In conversation with Justine Kurland | OSMOS Magazine Issue 29
Inside Justine Kurland and Marina Chao’s Defiant Collage Exhibition | AnOther, 2025
Justine Kurland on Photography as Utopia | MoMA Magazine, 2025
Justine Kurland: 99 Nude Collages on a Wall, Astor Weeks | Musée Magazine, 2025
This train: a photographic journal of motherhood on the road | The Times, 2024
Slifkin, Robert, “Justine Kurland: SCUMB Manifesto” | The Brooklyn Rail, 2021
Ammirati, Dominick, “Justine Kurland” | Artforum, Summer 2021
Another Look at Justine Kurland’s Girl Pictures | Vanity Fair, 2020