Barbara Kruger
Barbara Kruger is an American conceptual artist and collagist associated with the Pictures Generation. She is most known for her visual word art that consists of black-and-white photographs, overlaid with declarative captions, stated in white-on-red Futura Bold Oblique or Helvetica Ultra Condensed text. The phrases in her works often include pronouns such as "you", "your", "I", "we", and "they", addressing cultural constructions of power, identity, consumerism, and sexuality. Kruger's artistic mediums include photography, sculpture, graphic design, architecture, as well as video and audio installations.
Kruger lives and works in New York and Los Angeles. She is an Emerita Distinguished Professor of New Genres at the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture. In 2021, Kruger was included in Time magazine's annual list of the 100 Most Influential People.
Early life and career
Kruger was born into a working-class family in Newark, New Jersey. Her father worked as a chemical technician for Shell Oil and her mother was a legal secretary.Kruger graduated from Weequahic High School. She attended Syracuse University, but left after one year due to the death of her father. After her year at Syracuse University, in 1965, she went on to attend the Parsons School of Design in New York for a semester. Over the next ten years, Kruger established herself whilst pursuing graphic design for magazines and freelance picture editing, as well as designing book jackets. By the late 1960s, Kruger became interested in poetry, and began attending poetry readings as well as writing her own poetry. While at Parsons School of Design, Kruger studied art and design with Diane Arbus and Marvin Israel, and soon obtained a design job at Condé Nast Publications in her late teens. Shortly after, Kruger was awarded the position of head designer for the following year. She initially worked as a designer at Mademoiselle and later moved on to work part-time as a picture editor for House and Garden, Aperture, and other publications. She also wrote film, television, and music columns for Artforum and REALLIFE Magazine at the suggestion of her friend Ingrid Sischy.
Kruger's earliest works date back to 1969, when she began creating large wall hangings which incorporated materials such as yarn, beads, sequins, feathers, and ribbons. These pieces represented the feminist reclamation of craft during this period. Kruger crocheted, sewed, and painted brightly hued and erotically suggestive objects, some of which were included by curator Marcia Tucker in the 1973 Whitney Biennial. She drew her inspiration for these pieces from Magdalena Abakanowicz's show at the Museum of Modern Art. Although some of these works were included in the Whitney Biennial, Kruger became detached and unsatisfied with her working output. In 1976, she took a break from making what had become more abstract works, feeling that her work had become meaningless and mindless. She then moved to Berkeley, California, where she taught at the University of California and became inspired by the writings of Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes. In 1977, she returned to making art, working with her own architectural photographs and publishing an art book, Picture/Readings, in 1979. She was inspired to photograph architecture by her family's practice of touring "model homes they could never afford".
At the beginning of her art career, Kruger reportedly felt intimidated by entering New York galleries due to the prevailing atmosphere of the art scene which, to her, did not welcome "particularly independent, non-masochistic women". However, she received early support for her projects from groups such as the Public Art Fund, which encouraged her to continue making art. She switched to her modern practice of collage in the early 1980s.
Artistic practice
Addressing issues of language and sign, Kruger has often been grouped with such feminist postmodern artists as Jenny Holzer, Sherrie Levine, Martha Rosler, and Cindy Sherman. Like Holzer and Sherman, in particular, she uses the techniques of mass communication and advertising to explore gender and identity. She discusses her interest in representing "how we are to one another" and the "broad sort of scope" this provides for her work. Kruger is considered to be part of the Pictures Generation.Imagery and text
Much of Kruger's work pairs found photographs with pithy and assertive text that challenges the viewer, known as word art. Her method includes developing her ideas on a computer, later transferring the results into printed images. Examples of her instantly recognizable slogans include "I shop therefore I am", "Your body is a battleground", and "You are not yourself" appearing in her signature white letters against a red background. Most of her work deals with provocative topics like feminism, consumerism, and individual autonomy and desire, frequently appropriating images from mainstream magazines and using her bold phrases to frame them in a new context.Kruger has said that, "I work with pictures and words because they have the ability to determine who we are and who we aren't." A recurring element in her work is the appropriation and alteration of existing images. In describing her use of appropriation, Kruger states:
Pictures and words seem to become the rallying points for certain assumptions. There are assumptions of truth and falsity and I guess the narratives of falsity are called fictions. I replicate certain words and watch them stray from or coincide with the notions of fact and fiction.
Her poster for the 1989 Women's March on Washington in support of legal abortion included a woman's face bisected into positive and negative photographic reproductions, accompanied by the text "Your body is a battleground." A year later, Kruger used this slogan in a billboard commissioned by the Wexner Center for the Arts. Twelve hours later, a group opposed to abortion responded to Kruger's work by replacing the adjacent billboard with an image depicting an eight-week-old fetus.
Kruger's early monochrome pre-digital works, known as 'paste ups', reveal the influence of the artist's experience as a magazine editorial designer during her early career. These small scale works, the largest of which is 11 x 13 inches, are composed of altered found images, and texts either culled from the media or invented by the artist. A negative of each work was then produced and used to make enlarged versions of these initial 'paste ups'. Between 1978 and 1979, she completed "Picture/Readings", simple photographs of modest houses alternating with panels of words. From 1992 on, Kruger designed covers for a number of magazines, including Ms., Esquire, Newsweek, and The New Republic. Her signature font style of Futura Bold type is likely inspired by the "Big Idea" or "Creative Revolution" advertising style of the 1960s that she was exposed to during her experience at Mademoiselle.
In 1990, Kruger roused the Japanese American community of Little Tokyo, Los Angeles, with her proposal to paint the Pledge of Allegiance, bordered by provocative questions, on the side of a warehouse in the heart of the historic downtown neighborhood. Kruger had been commissioned by MOCA to paint a mural for "A Forest of Signs: Art in the Crisis of Representation", a 1989 exhibition that also included works by Barbara Bloom, Jenny Holzer, Jeff Koons, Sherrie Levine, and Richard Prince. But before the mural went up, Kruger herself and curator Ann Goldstein presented it at various community meetings over a period of 18 months. After participants voiced protests about her design, the artist offered to eliminate the pledge from her mural proposal, while still retaining a series of questions painted in the colors and format of the American flag: "Who is bought and sold? Who is beyond the law? Who is free to choose? Who follows orders? Who salutes longest? Who prays loudest? Who dies first? Who laughs last?". A full year after the exhibition closed, Kruger's reconfigured mural finally went up for a two-year run.
In 1995, with architects Henry Smith-Miller and Laurie Hawkinson and landscape architect Nicholas Quennell, she designed the 200-foot-long sculptural letters Picture This for a stage and outdoor amphitheater at the North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh.
For a site-specific piece that she produced at the Parrish Art Museum in 1998, Kruger placed across the upper range of the museum's Romanesque facade stark red letters that read, "You belong here"; below, on columns separating three arched entry portals, stacked letters spelled "Money" and "Taste". As part of the Venice Biennale in 2005, Kruger installed a digitally printed vinyl mural across the entire facade of the Italian pavilion, thereby dividing it into three parts—green at the left, red at the right, white in between. In English and Italian, the words "money" and "power" climbed the portico's columns; the left wall said, "Pretend things are going as planned", while "God is on my side; he told me so" filled the right. In 2012, her installation Belief+Doubt, which covers 6,700 square feet of surface area and was printed on wallpaper-like sheets in the artist's signature colors of red, black, and white, was installed at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.
In 2022, as the arguably most important voice in art for Abortion-rights movements, Kruger created a series of new works in response to the leaked Supreme Court documents that would overturn Roe v. Wade. Kruger said, "The end of Roe was clearly the result of the right's rage-filled campaign to undo women's reproductive health and agency. They have been unrelenting, while the middle and left too often kept silent, seeing the issue as the third rail of American politics, regardless of the poll numbers favoring Roe. For decades, abortion was absent or marginalized at campaign debates."