Barbara Kruger

Background

• Born in Newark, New Jersey, 1945• Syracuse University in 1965• Parson’s School of Design in New York in

1966• design job at Conde Nast Publications• head designer at Mademoiselle Magazine• taught at the California Institute of Art, The

School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and University of California, Berkeley.

• She lives in New York and Los Angeles

• Through work as a graphic designer, art director, and picture editor that Kruger developed a professional career as she defined herself as an artist.

• Her early experience as a graphic designer was the biggest influence on her work:

• “So, in a sort of circular fashion, my ‘job’ as a designer became, with a few adjustments, my ‘work’ as an artist.” -Kruger

Career

• layers found photographs from existing sources• Pairs text with the image• Then like a graphic designer, she lays up the image, pastes up

the text • sends the mechanical to a printer for enlargement and duplication• black-and-white photographs with overlaid captions set in white-

on-red Futura Bold Oblique.• Scale- works are very large 10 ft x 10 ft

Techniques

10 ft. 10 ft

About 9.5 ft x 9.5 ft

Methods

• iconography is drawn from the 1940s and 1950s• imagery derived from old film stills or

advertisements• acute camera angles, harsh lighting, and close-

ups • Kruger probes the boundaries separating

advertising, propaganda, and art.

• “I make art about power, love, life, and death.”-Kruger

• consciousness raising • propaganda and advertising.• female point of view• texts -gender equity• Images- females in positions of male roles of possession

and control.

• “I could say that I’m involved in a series of attempts to displace things, to change people’s minds, to make them think a little bit… I am interested in making art that displaces the powers that tell us who we can be and who we can’t be.”- Kruger

Approaches

• 1969 -started to make art• 1970 -moved into a loft in Tribeca that remains her

New York studio• 1970s work: crocheted and sewn hangings adorned

with paint, glitter, ribbons, etc. that asserted these decorative, techniques into the language of “art.”

• 1976 -shifted her work into more abstract object making

• 1977 -photography• The time had come to “re-think what it would mean to

call herself an artist.”

Studio

As well as appearing in museums and galleries worldwide… enters social spaces and undoes them.

• 1973- Biennial Exhibition: Contemporary American Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

• 1974 -Artists Space, New York• 1976 -John Doyle Gallery, Chicago• 1991 -Mary Boone Gallery, New York• 1999 -The American Century: Art & Culture 1900-

2000, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Galleries & Exhibitions

Installation, 1991, Mary Boone Gallery, New York

Installation, Power Pleasure Desire Disgust, 1997, NY

Publications & Public Projects

Untitled (Don't be a jerk), billboard installation, Melbourne, Australia, 1996

cover for Ms. magazine. January/February 1992, Photolithograph, composition and sheet

Relatedness to other artists

• Marcel Duchamp

• “She has pretty much refused to be overly expressive about herself-as-artist, and her work, though each example of it is blatantly a signature piece, has something of the impersonal lucidity we find in Marcel Duchamp’s work.”