Look Inside
Which art books, prints and posters are available by and about this artist? Here is a sample of items of interest to a typical collector:
99 Nude Collages on the Wall by Justine Kurland is a Risograph-printed zine of recent SCUMB collages sourced from the pages of multiple copies of a book of female nudes by a celebrated male photographer.
Kurland exchanged copies of her own book, SCUMB Manifesto (Mack, 2022), for the raw photographic-corporeal material. The women in the photographs were instructed to recline, bend over, or otherwise contort their bodies before being hit with the flash and committed to canonical, photographic memory. Kurland's collages are acts of reclamation through productive cutting and gluing, a layering process of subtraction and addition, and near-erasure before their reconstitution. The women's bodies are liberated from the male author's gaze that rendered them as static images, from the context that encircles the book and its publication, and from the very notion of male authorship as the male-dominated canon is dismembered and discarded. Each collage is a feminist action, reprising history, dissecting patriarchy, and inverting the usual terms of possession. Justine Kurland initiated SCUMB (Society for Cutting Up Men's Books) to purge her photobook library of books by the men who have dominated the field, monopolizing photographic language, value, and meaning.
Kurland's project has evolved over half a decade, spanning from its first presentation at Higher Pictures in 2021, larger scaled works at Watershed Art & Ecology in Chicago in 2023, as well as floral collages at Dashwood Projects in New York in 2024, and has been formalized in SCUMB Manifesto, published by MACK in 2022. Kurland ritual practice here is restorative.
The exhibition 99 Nude Collages on the Wall, presented by Astor Weeks and accompanying this book, stages an installation of all the collages as a singular sprawling wallflower. Individual works will be removed as transactions are made, giving way to a wall of work that progressively dissipates with demand.
A special photobook, Spirit West is about cacti and bra straps, about bubble gum and animal bodies, spring blossoms and asphalt. Pictures of neo-romantic landscapes inhabited by young adolescent girls, half-sprites, half juvenile delinquents. The beauty of the nature is overwhelming, but is regularly disturbed by an ugly viaduct or unsightly building.
Inspired by Valerie Solanas’ iconoclastic feminist tract SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men) Manifesto, SCUMB Manifesto introduces us to photographer Justine Kurland’s own uncompromising initiative: the Society for Cutting Up Men’s Books.
This volume presents a collection of collages Kurland created by cutting up and reconfiguring photobooks by male artists, as she went through the process of purging her own library of roughly 150 books by straight white men that have monopolized the photographic canon. The nature of collage — heterogeneous, pulled apart, shape shifting, disrupted, cyborg, fantasy — has long made it a feminist strategy in life and in art. Kurland's ritual is restorative and loving: each work is a reclamation of history; a dismemberment of the patriarchy; a gender inversion of the usual terms of possession; and a modest attempt at offsetting a life of income disparity.
While markedly different in style, the defiant female visions pictured in these compositions are a continuation of those depicted in Kurland’s earlier photographic projects Girl Pictures (1997–2002) and Mama Babies (2004–07). Each work in SCUMB sounds an electrifying call for freedom — the freedom to create, to destroy, to imagine, and to reshape our visual and social world.
Justine Kurland (b. 1969) is a contemporary American photographer known for her staged, cinematic images that explore themes of freedom, girlhood, motherhood, and the American landscape through a feminist lens.
She gained prominence with Girl Pictures (1997–2002), a series depicting adolescent girls living in imagined utopias in the wilderness—visions of rebellion, escape, and autonomy. In 2020, she published SCUMB Manifesto, a radical feminist collage project that critiques the male-dominated history of photography by repurposing the works of canonical male photographers.
Merging fantasy with realism, Kurland reclaims the American frontier as a space of female agency, resistance, and reinvention.
Kurland studied at the School of Visual Arts and Yale University, and her work is held in major institutions including MoMA, The Whitney, and The Art Institute of Chicago.
Poetry by Ariana Reines.