Justine Kurland (b. 1969)

Justine Kurland is known for “utopian photographs of American landscapes and the fringe communities, both real and imagined, that inhabit them.” Her wanderlust has taken her and her son on cross-country road trips where she sought out people choosing alternative lifestyles, spent weeks with them, and created work that has been lauded in exhibitions at the Detroit Institute of Arts and Museum of Modern Art, to name just two. Her 2007 one-person exhibition in New York, Of Woman Born, inspired a full-page review in The New York Times.

The Family comes from an early body of work that brought her immediate attention in the art world. Kurland’s photographic images draw upon the 19th-century American landscape painting tradition in which figures inhabit idealized, pristine vistas, such as those created by Thomas Cole (1801-1848) and Hudson River School artists, such as Frederic Edwin Church (1826–1900), Albert Bierstadt (1830–1902), and Asher B. Durand (1796-1886). Yet Kurland updates her images with idyllic female nudes in rhythm with their surroundings, thus insinuating a mythological symbolism at the same time they draw attention to the human relationship to the environment.

--Nancy Weekly, 2022