Brooklyn, NY & Rockbridge, VA | Mentor: Barbara Bosworth
Claire Kosky is an artist who creates compassionate examinations of interactions between humans and the natural world using a view camera. Drawing on her upbringing in rural Virginia, she travels from her current home in Brooklyn to places where she connects with people who work and live close to the land—farmers, herders, animal-processors, homesteaders, and collective living systems.
Her works ask if engaging with fundamental processes, the growth lives, and deaths, that nourish us might offer a way of remembering forgotten parts of what it means to be human. She received her Bachelors in photography from Bard College.
“At a time when it might have been easy for me to stop making work altogether, this fellowship made it impossible to ignore the wonder and vitality that photography brings to my life. Through the rigor of developing a new body of work under the tutelage of my mentor, I settled into a stronger understanding of the questions I’m interested in answering through my practice. I developed a sustainable way of working on these ideas, which gives me an immense sense of purpose.”
-Claire Kosky | 2026 Junior Fellow
Project Statement
All my life, I lived in rural places. I love the slowness, the bighearted people, the feeling of dirt against my bare feet. My family has a garden, a small one, which puts vegetables on the table in the summers and means we make fewer trips to the grocery store. Growing up, I took for granted this simple way of supporting ourselves through the land. I now live in a city, where the garden unfurls roots of longing in my mind as I walk down aisles of packaged lettuce and plastic meat without skin or eyes, face or feet.
My garden roots make me wonder about the processes that enable my way of life here in the city but are performed outside my vicinity of existence. What have I overlooked in the comfort of my familiar neighborhood? How much of my day is spent oblivious to the blossoms and rot, the lives and deaths, the processes of life, that make room for mine?
For the past six months, I’ve traveled to learn from people whose lives are centered around the land: young farmers beginning new vegetable practices, grandchildren caring for generational beef farms, women teaching how to slaughter animals with grace, and communal systems thriving on their acreage. By photographing them, I am searching for ways to combat the dissolution and depression I face, walking down the grocery store aisle. To organize a human life around plants and animals is not the most convenient way to live, yet the people I meet make themselves at home in its struggle. On their fecund soil, creatures in all stages of growth are cared for with reverence, tears, patience, and love. I’m drawn to those who embrace these emotions. Being with them makes me feel a little more worthy of the lives and deaths to which I am indebted.
2026 Junior Fellows: Yuhan Cheng | Brayan Enriquez | Claire Kosky | Jacobb Nichol | Avery Norman | Dahveed Wilkins