Barbara Kruger

Barbara Kruger
Barbara Kruger at ACCA, Melbourne
Born	(1945-01-26) January 26, 1945 (age 72) Newark, New Jersey, U.S.
Nationality	American
Education	Syracuse University, Parsons School of Design, New York
Known for	visual art

Barbara Kruger (born January 26, 1945) is an American conceptual artist and collagist. Much of her work consists of black-and-white photographs overlaid with declarative captions—in white-on-red Futura Bold Oblique or Helvetica Ultra Condensed. The phrases in her works often include pronouns such as "you", "your", "I", "we", and "they", addressing cultural constructions of power, identity, and sexuality. Kruger currently lives and works in New York and Los Angeles.

Kruger was born an only child into a lower-middle-class family in Newark, New Jersey. Her father worked as a chemical technician for Shell Oil and her mother was a legal secretary. She graduated from Weequahic High School. She attended Syracuse University but left after one year due to the death of her father. She studied art and design with Diane Arbus and Marvin Israel at Parsons School of Design in New York. Kruger soon obtained a design job at Condé Nast Publications. She initially worked as a designer at Mademoiselle and later moved on to work part-time as a picture editor at House and Garden, Aperture, and other publications. She also wrote film, television, and music columns for Artforum and Real Life Magazine at the suggestion of her friend Ingrid Sischy.

In her early years as a visual artist, Kruger crocheted, sewed and painted bright-hued and erotically suggestive objects, some of which were included by curator Marcia Tucker in the 1973 Whitney Biennial. They were inspired by Magdalena Abakanowicz’s show at the Museum of Modern Art. In 1976 she took a break from making what had become more abstract works, feeling that the work had become meaningless and mindless. She then moved to Berkeley, California where she taught at the University of California and became inspired by the writings of Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes. In 1977 she returned to artmaking, working with her own architectural photographs and publishing an artist's book, Picture/Readings, in 1979. She was inspired to photograph architecture from her family "looking at family homes [they] could never afford."