new project
(found) Biography on Barbara Kruger
Barbara Kruger was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1945. After attending Syracuse University, the School of Visual Arts, and studying art and design with Diane Arbus at Parson’s School of Design in New York, Kruger obtained a design job at Condé Nast Publications. Working for Mademoiselle Magazine, she was quickly promoted to head designer. Later, she worked as a graphic designer, art director, and picture editor in the art departments at House and Garden, Aperture, and other publications. This background in design is evident in the work for which she is now internationally renowned. She layers found photographs from existing sources with pithy and aggressive text that involves the viewer in the struggle for power and control that her captions speak to. In their trademark black letters against a slash of red background, some of her instantly recognizable slogans read “I shop therefore I am,” and “Your body is a battleground." Much of her text questions the viewer about feminism, classicism, consumerism, and individual autonomy and desire, although her black-and-white images are culled from the mainstream magazines that sell the very ideas she is disputing.The text she includes at her works usually refers to ‘we’,'i','they' and ‘you’ which satirically refer to ‘men’ and ‘women’. As well as appearing in museums and galleries worldwide, Kruger’s work has appeared on billboards, buscards, posters, a public park, a train station platform in Strasbourg, France, and in other public commissions. She has taught at the California Institute of Art, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and the University of California, Berkeley. She lives in New York and Los Angeles.
More about her work:
Barbara Kruger is internationally renowned for her signature black, white and red poster-style works of art that convey in-your-face messages on women's rights and issues of power. Coming out of the magazine publishing industry, Kruger knows precisely how to capture the viewer's attention with her bold and witty photomurals displayed on billboards, bus stops and public transportation as well as in major museums and galleries wordwide. She has edited books on cultural theory, including Remaking History for the Dia Foundation, and has published articles in the New York Times, Artforum, and other periodicals. Monographs on her work include Love for Sale, We Won't Play Nature to Your Culture and others. She is represented in New York by Mary Boone Gallery. A major exhibition of her work will be presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in fall 1999, and at the Whitney Museum in New York in 2000.
My research approach and methodology on this project and specifically on my assigned profile who is Barbara Kruger is for my primary research the internet , library and books that comprise the work and biography of Barbara Kruger (such as ‘The 20th century art book’, ‘Art Now’, ‘Female Artists’). As I can not do a market research on her work due to the fact that she is American and all her work is exhibited and found in certain parts of America my secondary research, will evolve a questionnaire of quotes that she came up with, based on issues and facts, that will be given to people in order to describe their feelings about each quote. From these answers I want to observe the effect that these powerful words have and although this work was produced almost 20 years ago you still –I believe- can put it to a current context. Also I will look to permanent collections of Tate Britain and Tate Modern as they might have a display of her work.
172 words.
