Justine Kurland | Marina Chao - Episode 94

Jun 17, 2025

Justine Kurland is an acclaimed artist known for her utopian landscapes and challenging narratives, while Marina Chao is a distinguished curator at CPW with a rich background in major art institutions. They delve into their collaborative exhibition, 'The Rose,' which celebrates feminist collage art as a means of expression and survival. The discussion highlights the contrasts in curatorial experiences from different renowned institutions and reflects on the transformative power of community in artistic practices. Themes of identity, collaboration, and the role of art in activism are also explored.

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ANECDOTE

Justine's Artistic Roots

Justine Kurland was influenced by her mother, an artist who supported the family through Renaissance Fairs trips.
She discovered photography in high school through a crush, which started her lifelong journey in art.

INSIGHT

Collage as Survival Strategy

Collage serves as both a political tool and a means of survival amid crisis.
Curators and artists view art as a way to build community and fight societal dismantling.

ADVICE

Embrace Multiple Artistic Roles

Artists should learn multiple roles such as collector, curator, and collaborator to challenge power hierarchies.
Wearing different hats fuels a collective, experimental, and interconnected approach to art and culture.

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In this episode of PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf, Sasha welcomes two extraordinary guests: artist and curator Justine Kurland and Marina Chao, a curator at CPW. Together, they discuss their collaboration on The Rose, an exhibition that explores collage as a feminist form, strategy, and genealogy. Featuring works by over fifty contemporary artists and key figures from the 1960s and 1970s, the exhibition examines collage as both a means of world-building and a survival strategy in times of crisis. Sasha, Justine, and Marina delve into the layered responsibilities of artists and discuss the assumption that interpreting a straightforward photograph is inherently simpler than reading and interpreting conceptual art.

https://www.justinekurland.com

https://cpw.org/staff/

https://cpw.org/exhibition/the-rose/

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.

Marina Chao has previously held curatorial positions at the International Center of Photography and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. As assistant curator at ICP she organized the exhibition Multiply, Identify, Her (2018) and contributed to the publication Public, Private, Secret: On Photography and the Configuration of Self (Aperture and ICP, 2018). She was awarded a 2019 Curatorial Research Fellowship from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts for Seeing Meaning, a project exploring the intersections of image, language, and technology.