Barbara Kruger: The Radical Voice of American Art

The Early Years

Barbara Kruger was born on January 26, 1945, in Newark, New Jersey. She was the only child in a lower-middle-class family. Her father worked as a chemical technician at Shell Oil, and her mother was a legal secretary. Kruger briefly attended Syracuse University but left after her father’s death. In 1965, she enrolled at the Parsons School of Design in New York. There, she studied art and design with Diane Arbus and Marvin Israel.

Soon after, Kruger got a job at Conde Nast Publications. She worked for various magazines within the group, most notably Mademoiselle. Within a year, she became head of the picture department. Kruger has stated that her time working on magazines was the most critical and influential period for her artistic development.

During this period, Kruger began reading and writing poetry and attending poetry readings. Her earliest works appeared in 1969. These were large wall hangings made with materials like yarn, beads, sequins, feathers, and ribbons. They embodied the feminist reclamation of traditional crafts.

The pieces, inspired by Magdalena Abakanowicz, were crocheted, sewn, brightly painted, and erotically charged. The Whitney Biennial featured some of these works in 1973. Nevertheless, Kruger became unhappy with her art, feeling it didn’t convey her true emotions. In 1976, she decided to take a break from creating art.

Entering A New Era

Kruger moved to Berkeley, California, and became a professor at the University of California. She found inspiration in the writings of Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes. In 1977, she resumed her artistic work, focusing on architectural photographs. Two years later, she published her book, Picture/Readings.

In the early 1980s, Kruger shifted to her signature collage style. It featured black-and-white photos with bold captions in white-on-red fonts Future Bold Oblique or Helvetica Ultra Condensed. Additionally, the text often included pronouns like you, your, I, we, and they, addressing themes of power, identity, consumerism, sexuality, and language.

Initially, Kruger felt intimidated by New York galleries, which were unwelcoming to women artists, especially independent ones. Despite this, she received support from groups like the Public Art Fund, which encouraged her to continue creating art.

When creating her pieces, Kruger starts with ideas on the computer and then transfers them to prints, often billboard-sized. Her signature font, Futura Bold, is inspired by the “Big Idea” advertising style of the 1960s, reflecting the Golden Age of American advertising that influenced her life and style. Furthermore, Alexander Rodchenko’s politically charged works also influence the font and her use of three primary colors. Her short phrases deliver sharp, pointed criticism.

Kruger’s aesthetics also draw inspiration from 1970s punk posters, album covers, graphic design, and magazines. From the beginning, she engaged with the language-based conceptual art of the 1960s and 1970s, influenced by artists like John Baldessari, Jenny Holzer, and Ed Ruscha. Additionally, the historical legacy of German Dadaism and Soviet agitprop by Ed Lissitzky and Alexander Rodchenko is evident in her work.

Barbara Kruger, A Feminist

People often group Barbara Kruger with feminist postmodern artists like Jenny Holzer, Sherrie Levine, Martha Rosler, and Cindy Sherman. Like Holzer and Sherman, Kruger uses mass communication and advertising techniques to explore gender identity. Her work combines found photographs with assertive text, creating what is known as word art. This approach challenges viewers and examines consumerism stereotypes and behaviors through a feminist lens with jarring sophistication. Kruger has expressed her views on feminist art, saying:

In 1989, Barbara Kruger designed a poster for the Women’s March on Washington supporting legal abortion. The poster showed a woman’s face split into positive and negative photographic halves, with the text “Your body is a battleground.” The following year, the Wexner Center for the Arts commissioned a billboard from the artist, and she used this slogan. Twelve hours later, an anti-abortion group responded by replacing Kruger’s billboard with an image of an eight-week-old fetus.

In 2022, Kruger emerged as a crucial voice in the art world for abortion rights. She created a series of works responding to the leaked Supreme Court documents indicating the potential overturning of Roe v. Wade. She commented:

In 1980, Barbara Kruger explored themes of womanhood and femininity with her piece Untitled (Perfect). This work depicts a woman’s torso with hands clasped in prayer, reminiscent of the Virgin Mary, the symbol of submissive femininity. The word “perfect” is boldly displayed along the lower edge of the image.

A Radical Voice

Beyond feminism, Barbara Kruger addresses themes like consumerism, individual autonomy, and desire. She appropriates images from mainstream magazines, overlaying them with bold phrases to create new contexts. On top of that, her language is sensational, authoritative, and direct, mirroring the style of media and politics. Thus, she urges viewers to question mainstream media and consider how these messages shape identity and society. Her work challenges us to reconsider the meanings we assign to visual signifiers of faith, morality, and power.

Kruger is associated with the Pictures Generation, a group of conceptual artists critically analyzing mass-media culture. Her goal remains unchanged—she uses graphic design techniques common in advertising to highlight harmful power structures. By utilizing the dominant media of late capitalist society, she critiques its patriarchal systems and hierarchies, repurposing this media for her message.

One example is her 1990 suggestion to paint the Pledge of Allegiance, bordered by provocative questions, on a warehouse in Little Tokyo, Los Angeles. This roused the Japanese American community. MOCA commissioned Barbara Kruger for the 1989 exhibition A Forest of Signs: Art in the Crisis of Representation, along with artists like Barbara Bloom, Jenny Holzer, Jeff Koons, Sherrie Levine, and Richard Prince. After protests from participants, she agreed to remove the Pledge of Allegiance but retained the provocative questions in the colors and format of the American flag.

In 1998, Barbara Kruger created a major installation at the Parrish Art Museum in New York. She placed red letters across the upper part of the museum’s Romanesque facade, spelling “You belong here.” On the columns separating the three arched entryways, she featured the words “money” and “taste.”

At the Venice Biennale in 2005, Kruger covered the entire facade of the Italian pavilion with a digitally printed vinyl mural. The mural was divided into three sections: green on the left, white in the middle, and red on the right. She displayed the words “money” and “power” in English and Italian on the columns. Additionally, in the green section, she wrote, “Pretend things are going as planned,” and in the red section, “God is on my side; he told me so.”

The Multidimensional Personality of Barbara Kruger

Barbara Kruger is a multidisciplinary artist. In addition to her photos, which were featured on public transport in France, New York, and Los Angeles from 1994 to 2017, she has also created video and audio installations and sculptures. In her installations, her still images gain movement and speech and position their commentary in space, questioning power, control, affection, and contempt. Moreover, she has written criticism, taught classes, curated exhibitions, and designed products like T-shirts and mugs.

Installations

Kruger’s installation work began in 1991 at the Mary Boone Gallery in New York, where she covered all four walls with provocative text and images. In 2022, she filled MoMA’s Marron Family Atrium with her signature statements on power, voyeurism, and the horrors of war.

In 2008, Kruger created the video installation Plenty, which appropriates advertisements to critique consumerism. This video was shown in a continuous loop on billboards along the Sunset Strip as part of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s viral public art exhibition Women In The City.

Sculpture

In the late 1990s, Barbara Kruger expanded her practice to include sculpture, continuing her critique of modern American culture. She created Justice in 1997 using white-painted fiberglass. It depicts J. Edgar Hoover and Roy Cohn—two right-wing figures believed to be homosexual—partially in drag, kissing each other. Kruger used this sculpture to highlight the conspiracy of silence that allowed these men to gain social and political power.

Merchandizing and the Case of Supreme

As Barbara Kruger’s work intersects with the consumer realm of merchandising, it blurs the lines between art and commerce while provoking discussion on the influence of advertising in public discourse. Notably, her iconic style has been co-opted by brands like Supreme, which adopted her white-type-on-red text treatment without denying its inspiration from her work. For decades, Kruger did not publicly address these copies. However, in 2013, when Supreme pursued legal action against a rival brand for logo infringement, Barbara Kruger finally spoke out:

In 2017, Barbara Kruger staged a visual performance titled Untitled (The Drop), which was a direct critique of the brand Supreme.

Conclusion

Barbara Kruger is a groundbreaking artist whose work powerfully interrogates consumerism, gender, and power through provocative text and imagery. Her art, which spans installations, sculptures, and video works, challenges viewers to question societal norms and the role of media in shaping identity. By merging art with commercial aesthetics, Kruger critiques and reflects on contemporary culture.