Justine Kurland

Bio

Justine Kurland is an artist known for photographs of the American landscape and the alternative communities, both real and imagined, that inhabit it. Her work challenges the traditionally masculine mythology of the American frontier, replacing it with narratives centered on female experience, connection, and possibility.

The photographs in Girl Pictures (1997–2002), the series featured in this exhibition, were made during extended cross-country road trips. Kurland staged scenes of teenage girls imagining they had run away from home to form communities on the fringes of cities and suburbs. Drawing on the runaway narrative from film and literature, she placed her subjects outside the structures of domestic life and into worlds of their own making. Together they built forts, wandered riverbanks and beneath highway overpasses, and transformed play into moments of intimacy, mutual care, and collective freedom. While conceived as performances of communal utopia, the girls' camaraderie often emerged naturally before the camera.

Kurland's work has been exhibited widely in the United States and abroad, and is held in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Getty Museum, the National Gallery of Art, and many other major museums. Her recent SCUMB Manifesto collages continue her feminist practice by transforming books by canonized male photographers through acts of destruction and repair. She lives and works in New York and is represented by Higher Pictures.