Artist

Barbara Kruger

born Newark, NJ 1945
Born
Newark, New Jersey, United States
Active in
  • New York, New York, United States
  • Los Angeles, California, United States
Biography

Barbara Kruger is an artist who has worked across a range of mediums to prompt critical reflection on how language and images shape society. As she remarked, "I try to be vigilant about the ways in which power is threaded through the everyday."

Kruger was raised in Newark, New Jersey, a diverse, working-class city, and this background, in her words, fostered a "consciousness of race and economic struggle [that] shape[d] the development" of her practice. In 1964, she pursued art at Syracuse University, and the following year she studied with photographer Diane Arbus and graphic designer Marvin Israel at the Parsons School of Design (now part of The New School). Kruger began working for Condé Nast in New York City in 1966 and soon became head designer at Mademoiselle magazine. She worked in graphic design until the mid-1970s while also painting and experimenting with textiles.

Though her work was positively received in a number of exhibitions, Kruger halted her creative practice in 1976, believing her artmaking was not adequately situated within "a larger power structure of social relations." Leaving New York, she landed in California by 1977, where she taught at the University of California, Berkeley, and the California Institute of the Arts in Santa Clarita. There, Kruger began taking photographs, and in 1978 she self-published Picture/Readings (1978), which pairs photographs of architectural exteriors with textual imaginings about their dwellers.

During the early 1980s, Kruger started using existing images as material rather than her own photographs. In what she termed "paste-ups" (1980–92), Kruger juxtaposed found black-and-white images—sourced from magazines, newspapers, and television—with short textual declarations set within black, white, or red bands. These works addressed topics from consumerism to gender roles to power dynamics, often playing with common aphorisms as in Untitled (We will no longer be seen and not heard) (1985, SAAM). Rather than insist on any single, fixed interpretation, Kruger asks us to observe how our own readings make meaning. In 1988, Kruger began transforming her paste-ups into large-scale photographic and digital prints.

Starting in the mid-1980s, Kruger also directed her attention to public spaces, examining the murky crossovers between art and commerce, because, as she put it, "I began to understand that outside the market there is nothing." She placed her incisive commentary onto t-shirts and tote bags as well as buses and billboards. By the early 1990s, Kruger engaged with architecture, covering entire spaces with an array of her signature trenchant phrases, as in Belief + Doubt (2012, The Hirshhorn), to demonstrate how these shared sites, in her words, "form us as much as we form them."

Since the 2000s, Kruger's reinvention of many of her seminal works in new mediums and formats, including animations of her paste-ups, has made clear the ongoing importance of her engagement with the systems of representation. As Kruger put it, "I'd like my work to be a visual contribution to the discussions that determine the way we live our lives."

Authored by Katherine Markoski, American Women's History Initiative Writer and Editor, 2024