JULIAN JOSEPH KYLE
The Labor of Justice
In ‘The Labor of Justice’, Julian Joseph Kyle stages a dialogue across history, caricature, and legislation — examining the structures, influences and impact surrounding Black Labor in the United States. Through three commanding works, the exhibition creates space to reflect and stand awe of the impact of Black perseverance in the pursuit of true freedom.
The exhibition features powerful, large-scale, richly layered paintings that are not mere tributes, but powerful portraits that confront systemic injustice while affirming dignity and hope. The work does not smooth over contradictions; it invites them to sit beside one another in full view. Across these three artworks, viewers are invited to consider the outsized impact, determination and brilliance of Black people alongside the barriers and narratives put in place to maintain an imagined hierarchy of humankind.
This is an exhibition about testimony, memory, and possibility. Welcome.
Rent
8 x 4 feet
Acrylic on salvaged wood
2025
This large monochrome painting grounds the exhibition in the raw reality of work. A group of Black sharecroppers bends to the fields, their bodies consumed by cotton. It’s a scene of back-breaking endurance—work that was supposed to be freedom after slavery, but instead locked families into cycles of poverty. This image reminds us that Black labor has always been both invisible and foundational: it fueled the American economy, yet the people behind it were denied the wealth they created.
A Justice Supreme
36 x 36 inches
Acrylic on Canvas
2025
This work places Clarence Thomas and Ketanji Brown Jackson—the two Black justices of the U.S. Supreme Court—into a shared, complicated portrait. Their faces sit between realism and caricature, surrounded by imagery that references both power and distortion. By putting them together, the painting doesn’t just show difference—it shows a struggle over what justice means, who defines it, and how the labor of Black Americans is recognized or erased at the highest levels of the law.
The myth of the Lazy Sharecropper
35 x 42 inches
Acrylic of salvaged wood
2025
This painting takes a racist cartoon image of a so-called “lazy sharecropper” and turns it on its head. By repainting the figure in bold, flat colors, the piece doesn’t hide the ugliness of the stereotype—it exposes it. The cartoon, once used to mock Black labor, is reclaimed as a site of critique. Here, we’re asked to think about how Black people’s hard work built this country, even as mainstream media often ridiculed and dismissed them.
