Barbara Kruger is an American feminist conceptual artist who challenges cultural assumptions by manipulating images and text in her photographic compositions. She is best known for her print Untitled (Your body is a battleground) (1989) which uses her signature style of a black and white photograph with red and white text. The image was designed for the 1989 Women’s March on Washington in support of legal abortion.
Kruger was born in 1945 in Newark, New Jersey. She attended Weequahic High School in Newark before continuing her education at Syracuse University where she took a range of art and design classes. After a year, Kruger transferred to Parsons School of Design in New York City where she was taught by photographer Diane Arbus and graphic designer Marvin Israel among others. Israel encouraged her to create a professional portfolio when she felt that art school wasn’t for her and after a year, she left. Kruger then landed a job at Condé Nast Publications. where she worked as a designer at Mademoiselle Magazine. She become lead designer within a year of being hired at the age of twenty-two but she felt unsatisfied with editorial work. She then moved on to work as a graphic designer, art director, and picture editor in the art departments at House and Garden and Aperture. She also did magazine layouts, book jacket designs, and freelance picture editing for other publications.
As an Artist, Kruger had started out working on crocheted, sewed and painted bright-hued and erotically suggestive objects. Her textile based work showed the feminist reclamation of craft during this period of time. In 1973 several of her works were selected by curator Marcia Tucker (later the founder of the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York) for the Whitney Biennial Exhibit. This was followed by solo exhibitions at Artists Space and Fischbach Gallery in New York. Kruger was unhappy with her artist output and felt that it was not representative of her social and political ideas and in 1976, she gave up making art and moved to Berkeley, California. Kruger took a position teaching at the University of California, and while teaching she began reading the work of Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes who would later influence her artistic output.
In 1977, Kruger returned to making art and took up photography. She produced a series of architectural images which she captions with thoughts of who could be occupying the buildings featured and published this work as a book entitled Picture/Readings in 1979. That same year Kruger began using found images in her art, focusing on mid-century American print-media. She combined these images with words collaged over the top of them, taking inspiration from her years as a graphic designer. Kruger had found a way to convey her political, social and feminist ideas and used her collages to comment on religion, sex, racial and gender stereotypes, consumerism, corporate greed and power. In the early 1980’s, Kruger continued to refine her style and her signature use of copped, large-scale, black and white photography juxtaposed with raucous, pithy, and often ironic aphorisms. Kruger used text printed in Futura Bold typeface against black, white, or red text bars, taking inspiration from Russian Constructivists like Alexander Rodchenko. Kruger utilised images from the mainstream magazines that she was rallying against, Kruger was subverting the mainstream for her own cause, manipulating and recontextualizing imagery to question the way accepted sources of power present female identity. Kruger used short, instantly recognisable slogans, including “I shop, therefore I am,” and “Your body is a battleground” – designed for the 1989 Women’s March on Washington in support of legal abortion – which are hugely effective in communicating both Kruger’s stance on political, social and feminist issues and in questioning the ideals of the viewer.
In 1991, Kruger began to explore further areas of art with a self-titled solo exhibition at the Mary Boone Gallery in New York. Kruger created immersive installations, covering the gallery’s interior with her signature images and text, transforming it into an “arena of hostility”. She was the first female artist signed to the Mary Boone Gallery.
Kruger returned to magazine design in the 1990’s, creating covers for The New Republic, Ms., Newsweek, and Esquire, among others. Kruger has continued to expand her artistic output, and has created large-scale installations for museums and public spaces internationally, including a landscape architecture piece Picture This (1995) for the sculpture park at the North Carolina Museum of Art. In addition to this, her work has appeared on billboards, bus cards, posters, a public park, a train station platform in Strasbourg, France, and in other public commissions. Kruger’s work appears in the permanent collections of several major museums, including the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art, both in New York City. In addition to her time teaching at the University of California, Kruger has also taught at the Whitney Museum; California Institute of the Arts, Valencia; Chicago; UCSD and the University of California at Los Angeles. In 1995–96, she she created Public Service Announcements addressing issues of domestic violence while artist in residence at the Wexner Center for the Arts.
In 2001, Kruger was awarded the MOCA Award to Distinguished Women in the Arts and in 2005, she was the recipient of the Leone d’Oro for lifetime achievement while included in The Experience of Art at the Venice Biennale – the first Biennale curated by two women. She continues to critique contemporary life and has stated that “I think that art is still a site for resistance … I’m trying to be affective, to suggest changes, and to resist what I feel are the tyrannies of social life on a certain level.” She has influenced many artists, including the artist Shepard Fairey, the Guerilla Girls and Lorna Simpson who all employ a similar use of image and text combined with cultural critique.