29 Oct Artist Spotlights: Kimerlee Curyl

Kimerlee Curyl’s intimate, up-close fine art photographs celebrate the exquisite beauty found amidst bands of wild horses that roam parts of the American West. At the same time, her works express the heartbreaking plight of these endangered national treasures. “Wild horses,” she says, “are being removed from the land not because they damage it but because special interests want to have more land for cattle, sheep, oil, gas, mining, and fracking, industries that make money off these same public lands.”

The dual pathway that led Curyl to such vital advocacy through her art began in the town of Mounds View, Minnesota, near Minneapolis, where she grew up loving both horses and photography. “My mother swears that my first word was ‘horse,’ even though we didn’t have one,” she says with a laugh. “But a horse lived next door, and my parents remembered that I crawled through barbed wire without a scratch to stand underneath this giant animal.” Meanwhile, in high school, she was a dedicated photography student.

Snow White | Limited-Edition Archival Photographic Print | 20 x 30 inches to 60 x 90 inches

Nonetheless, her first career path was on the other side of the lens. As a young woman, she moved to Los Angeles to pursue acting, landing work in films, television, and commercials. During one TV project, she had several long conversations about photography with its star, Dennis Hopper, himself an accomplished photographer and art collector. That, along with her admiration for the work of famed photographer Herb Ritts and his still images and music videos, led her back to photography.

In 2003, Curyl was inspired to photograph an orphanage in Tijuana that her acting coach was supporting; the sale of those images to friends raised enough money to purchase a new commercial-sized refrigerator for the orphanage. “Photography,” she says, “began to move to the foreground.”

Unicorn | Limited-Edition Archival Photographic Print | 20 x 30 inches to 60 x 90 inches

In 2004, she bought her first horse, a red-and-white paint named Sequoia. “And that,” she says, “is when my life changed completely.” Her riding instructor at the Los Angeles Equestrian Center taught her natural horsemanship, which refers to the behavior of horses in the wild and considers the animal’s perspective. This piqued her interest in observing — and photographing — wild horses herself. Soon, she began showing her photographs. In 2009, she moved to the Santa Ynez Valley, an idyllic winemaking and equestrian region about two and a half hours northwest of Los Angeles. “Since that day, I’ve been a full-time photographer,” she says.

Stay Wild | Limited-Edition Archival Photographic Print | 20 x 30 inches to 60 x 90 inches

Among Curyl’s most poignant works is Snow White, an image of a very pregnant and exhausted wild white mare on a vast reserve in Wyoming, eyes closed and resting her head on the back of her protective stallion. “To me, this is such a perfect example of what family bonds mean to endangered wild horses. And who are we to strip that away from them?”

See Kimerlee Curyl’s photography at Gallery Wild in Jackson Hole, Wyoming; Exhibit in Tulsa, Oklahoma; Kelsey Michaels Fine Art in Laguna Beach, California; Canteen Lifestyle & Design in Westlake Village, California; and Jenni Kayne in Los Angeles (Brentwood), West Hollywood, Newport Beach, Carmel, Larkspur, and Palo Alto, California.

Based in Marin County, California, Norman Kolpas is the author of more than 40 books and hundreds of articles. He also teaches nonfiction writing in The Writers’ Program at UCLA Extension.