Barbara Kruger facts for kids

Barbara Kruger (born January 26, 1945) is an American artist who creates art based on ideas. She is also a collagist, meaning she makes art by combining different images and texts. She is known for her unique style that mixes black-and-white photos with bold messages.

These messages are often in white letters on a red background, using fonts like Futura Bold Oblique or Helvetica Ultra Condensed. Her art often uses words like "you," "your," "I," "we," and "they." She uses these words to talk about big ideas like power, who we are, and how much we buy things. Barbara Kruger works with many different art forms, including photography, sculpture, graphic design, and video.

Kruger lives and works in New York and Los Angeles. She is a respected professor at the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture. In 2021, Time magazine named her one of the 100 Most Influential People in the world.

Early Life and Career

Barbara Kruger grew up in a working-class family in Newark, New Jersey. Her father worked for an oil company, and her mother was a legal secretary.

After high school, she went to Syracuse University but left after a year because her father passed away. In 1965, she studied art and design at the Parsons School of Design in New York for a semester. During this time, she learned from famous artists like Diane Arbus.

For the next ten years, Kruger worked in graphic design for magazines. She also did freelance picture editing and designed book covers. She worked for magazines like Mademoiselle and House and Garden. She also wrote about film, TV, and music for art magazines.

Around 1969, Kruger started making large wall hangings using materials like yarn and beads. These early works showed her interest in feminism. She later felt these works were not meaningful enough. In 1976, she took a break from art. She moved to California and taught at the University of California. There, she found new inspiration from writers like Walter Benjamin.

In 1977, she returned to making art. She started using her own photographs of buildings and published an art book called Picture/Readings in 1979. She got the idea to photograph buildings from her family, who used to tour "model homes they could never afford." In the early 1980s, she began creating the collage style she is famous for today.

Artistic Practice

Barbara Kruger is often grouped with other feminist artists like Jenny Holzer and Cindy Sherman. Like them, she uses techniques from mass media and advertising to explore ideas about gender and identity. She wants to show "how we are to one another" in her art. Kruger is considered part of the Pictures Generation, a group of artists who used images from popular culture.

Imagery and Text

Belief+Doubt (2012) at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden

Much of Kruger's art combines found photographs with short, strong messages. These messages challenge the viewer and are a form of word art. She creates her ideas on a computer, then prints them as large images, sometimes as big as billboards.

Some of her well-known slogans include "I shop therefore I am," "Your body is a battleground," and "You are not yourself." These phrases appear in her signature white letters on a red background. Her work often deals with important topics like feminism, consumerism (buying things), and personal freedom. She often takes images from magazines and adds her bold phrases to give them a new meaning.

Kruger has said, "I work with pictures and words because they have the ability to determine who we are and who we aren't." She often takes existing images and changes them. Her early works were made before computers, using a technique called 'paste ups'. She would combine found images with texts she wrote or found in the media.

From 1992 onwards, Kruger designed covers for many magazines, including Ms., Esquire, and Newsweek. Her famous font style, Futura Bold, was likely inspired by 1960s advertising, which she saw when she worked at Mademoiselle.

In 1990, Kruger planned a mural for Little Tokyo, Los Angeles. It was going to feature the Pledge of Allegiance with challenging questions. After some community concerns, she changed the design. The final mural had questions like "Who is bought and sold?" and "Who dies first? Who laughs last?" painted in the colors of the American flag.

Kruger has also created large art pieces for public spaces. In 1995, she designed giant sculptural letters that spelled Picture This for an outdoor theater in North Carolina. For the Venice Biennale in 2005, she covered the Italian pavilion with a vinyl mural. It had words like "money" and "power" on the columns, and phrases like "Pretend things are going as planned" on the walls. In 2012, her huge installation Belief+Doubt covered 6,700 square feet at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.

Public Transport

Kruger's art has appeared on public transport. In 1994, her work L'empathie peut changer le monde (Empathy can change the world) was put on a train platform in France. In 1997, she had city buses in New York wrapped with quotes from famous people. To promote her first big art show in Los Angeles, she created billboards and posters in both English and Spanish.

She also designed a bus wrap for a campaign to support arts education in Los Angeles. It had phrases like, "Give your brain as much attention as you do your hair and you'll be a thousand times better off." In 2017, her artwork was featured on 50,000 special edition MetroCards in New York City.

Fashion

In 1984, Kruger designed a T-shirt with a woman's face and the words "I can't look at you ... and breathe at the same time." She made this shirt with fashion designer Willi Smith.

In 2017, Kruger worked with the clothing brand Volcom. She opened a pop-up shop in New York where T-shirts, hats, sweatshirts, and skateboards with her art were sold.

Permanent Installations

Barbara Kruger has created permanent art installations in several places. These include the Fisher College of Business, the Broad Contemporary Art Museum at LACMA, and Price Center at the University of California, San Diego. From 2008 to 2011, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm showed three large collages at its entrance. In 2012, her work Belief+Doubt became a permanent installation at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C.

In 2024, Kruger was chosen as one of 18 artists to create art for the new Terminal 6 at John F. Kennedy International Airport, set to open in 2026.

Other Works

Since the mid-1990s, Kruger has created large video and audio art installations that surround the viewer. In 1997, she made sculptures of famous people, like John F. and Robert F. Kennedy holding Marilyn Monroe on their shoulders. In 2016, she created art protesting the election of Donald Trump for the cover of New York magazine. For the 2020 Frieze Art Fair in Los Angeles, she displayed 20 questions, such as "Who do you think you are?" and "Who dies first? Who laughs last?", on billboards and public spaces across the city.

Teaching

Kruger has taught art at several universities, including the California Institute of the Arts, the University of California, Berkeley, and the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture. She is now an Emerita Distinguished Professor of New Genres at UCLA. In 1995–96, she created public service announcements about domestic violence. She has also written about television, film, and culture for various magazines and newspapers.

Connections with Other Artists

Kruger was part of a group of artists who moved to New York City in the 1970s. She considered her teacher Diane Arbus to be her "first female role model." She was friends with many artists, including Sherrie Levine, Cindy Sherman, and Jenny Holzer. She also joined a group called Artists Meeting for Cultural Change in the 1970s.

Exhibitions

In 1979, Barbara Kruger showed her first works combining photos and text at the P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in New York. Her first major show in London was at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1983.

In 1999, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles held the first big show looking back at Kruger's career since 1978. This show then traveled to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 2000. Kruger has had many solo exhibitions around the world, including in Montreal, London, Siena, San Diego, and Stockholm.

In 2009, Kruger's work was featured in "The Pictures Generation, 1974–1984" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She has also participated in important art events like the Whitney Biennial and Documenta. She represented the United States at the Venice Biennale in 1982, 2005, and 2022. She received the prestigious Leone d'Oro (Golden Lion award) for her lifetime achievements in art.

In 2007, she was part of South Korea's first women's art show, the Incheon Women Artists' Biennale. That same year, she designed an exhibition called "Consider This..." at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In 2009, her large installation Between Being Born and Dying opened at the Lever House in New York City.

From September 2021 to January 2022, a major exhibition called Barbara Kruger: Thinking of You, I Mean Me, I Mean You was shown at the Art Institute of Chicago. It then moved to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) from March to July 2022.

Kruger's words and pictures have been shown in art galleries and public places. Her art has also appeared on posters, postcards, T-shirts, electronic signs, and billboards.

Personal Life

Barbara Kruger lives in the Beachwood Canyon neighborhood of Los Angeles.

Recognition

The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles gave Kruger the MOCA Award to Distinguished Women in the Arts in 2001. In 2005, she received the Leone d'Oro for lifetime achievement at the Venice Biennale. In 2012, she was honored by TV presenter Rachel Maddow at the Hammer Museum. In 2021, Time magazine included her in its annual list of the 100 Most Influential People.

Art Market

Kruger's first art dealer was Gagosian Gallery in the early 1980s. In 1988, she became the first woman to join the Mary Boone art gallery, where she had nine solo shows. After that gallery closed, she moved to David Zwirner Gallery in 2019. She is also represented by other galleries in Chicago and Berlin.

In late 2011, one of Kruger's photos from 1985, Untitled (When I Hear the Word Culture I Take Out My Checkbook), sold for a record $902,500 at Christie's.

Supreme Lawsuit

Supreme, a popular skateboard and clothing brand, has been accused of copying their logo from Barbara Kruger's signature style. Their logo is a white word "Supreme" on a red box, which looks very similar to Kruger's art. James Jebbia, the founder of Supreme, has admitted that the logo was inspired by Kruger's work.

Kruger herself did not comment on this issue for a long time. However, during a lawsuit between Supreme and another clothing brand, Leah McSweeney's Married to the Mob (MTTM), Kruger finally spoke out. She said, "What a ridiculous clusterfuck of totally uncool jokers. I make my work about this kind of sadly foolish farce. I'm waiting for all of them to sue me for copyright infringement."

Books

• My Pretty Pony (1989), text by Stephen King, illustrations by Barbara Kruger
• Remote Control: Power, Cultures, and the World of Appearances by Barbara Kruger, 1994
• Love for Sale by Kate Linker, 1996
• Thinking of You, 1999 (The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles)
• Money Talks by Barbara Kruger and Lisa Phillips, 2005
• Barbara Kruger by Barbara Kruger, Rizzoli 2010

Film and Video

• "The Globe Shrinks". 2010
• "Pleasure, Pain, Desire, Disgust". 1997
• "Twelve". 2004
• Bulls on Parade video clip, Rage Against the Machine (1996)
• "Art in the Twenty-First Century". 2001
• "Picturing Barbara Kruger". 2015

Images for kids

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  Barbara Kruger at ACCA, Melbourne

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  Barbara Kruger at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam

See also

In Spanish: Barbara Kruger para niños

• Art & Language
• You Are Not Yourself, 1981 work by Kruger
• Feminist art movement in the United States
• Shepard Fairey
• Jenny Holzer
• Louise Lawler
• Cindy Sherman