Keisha Scarville & Justine Kurland on 'Passports'

Join Keisha Scarville and Justine Kurland for a dialogue between artists and friends, with a focus on Scarville’s recent book 'Passports'.
About this Event

Published in June this year, presents an intimate body of work by Keisha Scarville taken from an ongoing series centred around her father’s earliest passport photograph. The artist has reinterpreted the photograph over three hundred times to date, each iteration reworked and collaged with varying materials and found imagery – paints, beads, photograph fragments of Black bodies, gold leaf, glitter – to form a deeply textured act of photomontage.

Scarville weaves together themes dealing with loss, latencies, and the elusive body. Her work has been exhibited at the International Center of Photography; Studio Museum in Harlem; Huxley-Parlour, London; ICA Philadelphia; Contact Gallery, Toronto; Lightwork; The Brooklyn Museum of Art; Higher Pictures; and Webber Gallery, LA. Recent group exhibitions include the 2nd Bienal das Amazonias (2025); Les Rencontres D’Arles (2025); and ‘The Rose’ at the lumber room, Portland (2023). Her work is held in the collections of the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Yale University Art Gallery, George Eastman House, Denver Museum of Art, and the Detroit Institute of Arts. She has participated in residencies at Lightwork, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, WOPHA, Baxter Street CCNY, and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She is a Visiting Professor in the Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies at Harvard University and a faculty member at Parsons School of Design in New York. Her first book, , was published by MACK and shortlisted for the 2023 Paris Photo–Aperture PhotoBook Award.

Justine Kurland, known for her utopian photographs of American landscapes and their fringe communities, has spent the better part of the last twenty years on the road. Her recent work contemplates her origins: her apartment in New York City, her hometown of Fulton, New York, and her mother’s home in rural Virginia. Born in Warsaw, New York, 1969, she received her BFA from the School of Visual Arts and her MFA from Yale University. Her work is in the public collections of institutions including the Guggenheim Museum, Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, and International Center of Photography, among others. Her publications include (2022) and (2024).

N.B. This event is free and open to the public, though advance registration is encouraged. Please note priority will be given to those who have registered in advance, though advance registration does not guarantee admission once the event reaches capacity. Please arrive early to avoid disappointment.