Barbara Kruger

Barbara Kruger (born January 26, 1945) is an American conceptual artist and collagist associated with the Pictures Generation.

She is most known for her collage style 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 (often billboard-sized) 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.