1. Barbara Kruger

2. 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

3. Career
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

4. Techniques 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

5. 10 ft. 10 ft

6. About 9.5 ft x 9.5 ft

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

11. Approaches 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

17. Studio 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.”

21. Galleries & Exhibitions
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 , Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

22. Installation, 1991, Mary Boone Gallery, New York

23. Installation, Power Pleasure Desire Disgust, 1997, NY

24. Publications & Public Projects
Untitled (Don't be a jerk), billboard installation, Melbourne, Australia, 1996

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

26. 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.”