JOSH KLINE

Kline’s practice has been recognised through a major mid-career museum survey, Josh Kline: Project for a New American Century, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and a solo exhibition devoted to his “Climate Change” cycle at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. His work has generated extensive critical discussion and is held in leading public collections, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

Life and Early Practice

Born in 1979 in Philadelphia, USA, Josh Kline studied film at Temple University in Philadelphia before relocating to New York in 2002, where he continues to live and work. He spent his early years in the city employed across the art and media worlds—as a curator and organiser of video and new‑media programmes at the non‑profit Electronic Arts Intermix in New York, as a studio assistant, and in other art‑adjacent jobs that kept him close to exhibition‑making and technology. During this period he worked with and around artists associated with EAI, including figures such as Dan Graham, gaining firsthand insight into performance, video and conceptual practices that had tested the limits of medium and institution since the 1960s and 70s. Rather than entering the field through a traditional MFA route, Kline emerged alongside a cohort of artists who did not pursue graduate art school but learned in studios, galleries, non‑profits and production houses, a background that informs his sensitivity to class, precarity and the infrastructures underpinning contemporary art.

Artistic Practice

Josh Kline’s practice centres on three interrelated bodies of mixed-media work: Creative Labor (2009–14), Blue Collars (2014–20), and an ongoing installation cycle that began with Freedom (2014–16) and has progressed through Unemployment, Civil War, and Climate Change (2019–). Each chapter comprises standalone works that address economic insecurity, contemporary politics, and the conditions of working life.

Creative Labor portrays cultural workers in an always-on, post-industrial economy, showing how personality, time and the body are mobilised as resources within digital capitalism, often through advertising formats, stimulants and stylised display. Blue Collars extends this focus to service-sector workers such as delivery drivers, hotel housekeepers and restaurant staff. Here 3D-scanned body fragments and interview videos are displayed in shopping carts, shelving and shrink-wrap, as in In Stock (Walmart Worker’s Arms) (2018) and Cost of Living (Aleyda) (2014), shown in America Is Hard to See at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2015.

Beginning with Freedom, Kline’s untitled installation cycle considers the politics and economics of the 21st century, from networked protest and militarised policing through mass white-collar unemployment and a fractured United States to climate crisis and its effects on everyday life. Works from Unemployment and Civil War were central to the Whitney Museum survey Josh Kline: Project for a New American Century (2023), which brought together Teletubby police from Freedom, plastic-wrapped office workers from Unemployment, 3D-printed limbs, climate-refugee tents and political-style advertisements to link policy, technology and everyday survival. At the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, curators presented Climate Change as an immersive group of installations combining film, sculpture, architecture and lighting, focusing on essential workers and displaced people in a warming world.

In recent projects such as Social Media, shown at Lisson Gallery, New York, Kline applies this critique to his own position as a mid-career artist. Works including Mid-Career Artist (2024), a 3D replica of his body sealed in a bag, and Professional Default Swaps (2024), studio tools overprinted with corporate and credit-card branding, use 3D scanning and office-like display to examine how artists themselves are treated as products within the contemporary art economy.

Alongside his studio practice, Kline has written about the structural conditions of contemporary art. His essay “New York Real Estate and the Ruin of American Art,” published in the Winter 2025–26 issue of October and released online in January 2026, argues that escalating real-estate costs, institutional power and a prolonged market downturn have made New York increasingly difficult for working artists, particularly those using time- and space-intensive media. In 2026, Kline is residence at STPI – Creative Workshop & Gallery in Singapore, developing new print and paper-based works that extend his interest in technology, labour and speculative futures.

Exhibitions

Kline has presented his work in a series of significant solo and group exhibitions that trace the evolution of his major bodies of work across the United States, Europe and Asia.

Select solo exhibitions

• 2024 –2025 Josh Kline: Climate Change, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (with catalogue).
• 2024 – Social Media, Lisson Gallery, New York.
• 2023 – Josh Kline: Project for a New American Century, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (first U.S. museum survey; catalogue).
• 2022 – Adaptation, LAXART, Los Angeles.
• 2020 – Alternative Facts, Various Small Fires, Seoul.
• 2019 – Climate Change: Part One, 47 Canal, New York.
• 2017 – Civil War, Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London.
• 2016 – Unemployment, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin.
• 2016 – Unemployment, 47 Canal, New York.
• 2015 – Freedom, Modern Art Oxford, Oxford.
• 2011 – Dignity and Self-Respect, 47 Canal, New York.

Selected group exhibitions

• 2026–27 – Future Geographies: Art in the Century of Climate Change, Vancouver Art Gallery.
• 2026–27 – Guggenheim Pop: 1960 to Now, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
• 2026 – Studio Visit (curatorial project with Anicka Yi), Performance Space New York / Hauser & Wirth, New York.
• 2024 – 24th Biennale of Sydney, Sydney.
• 2024 – 8th Yokohama Triennale, Yokohama.
• 2019 – Whitney Biennial 2019, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
• 2019 – New Order: Art and Technology in the Twenty-First Century, Museum of Modern Art, New York.
• 2019 – The Body Electric, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco.
• 2016 – 9th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, Berlin.
• 2016 – Suspended Animation, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.
• 2015 – 2015 Triennial: Surround Audience, New Museum, New York.
• 2015 – America Is Hard to See, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
• 2015 – Office Space: The Modern Workplace Disrupted, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco.
• 2013 – New Pictures of Common Objects, MoMA PS1, New York.

Josh Kline FAQs

Ocula | 2026