Barbara Kruger

Before any of the art, there was the page. Kruger grew up in a working-class family in Newark, her father a chemical technician and her mother a legal secretary. She went to Syracuse University and left after a year when her father died, then spent a semester at Parsons School of Design studying with Diane Arbus and Marvin Israel. A design job at Condé Nast followed while she was barely out of her teens, and within a year she was head designer, laying out Mademoiselle. For roughly a decade she designed and edited pictures for magazines. She learned type, cropping, and how a page reaches out and takes hold of a reader. Then she turned that machinery against itself.

The work looks like advertising because it is built like advertising. She takes found black-and-white photographs, crops them hard, and lays declarative text across them in white Futura Bold Oblique on red. The pronouns do the work. Your, you, we, I. The viewer is addressed and implicated without ever learning who is speaking. I shop therefore I am. Your gaze hits the side of my face. The best known is Your body is a battleground, made in 1989 for the March on Washington for reproductive rights.

Work that indicts consumption and the manufacture of desire has itself become expensive. In 2011 a 1985 piece, a ventriloquist's dummy captioned When I hear the word Culture I take out my Checkbook, sold at Christie's for 902,500 dollars, and the images hang in the museums they are aimed at. The format has also been absorbed wholesale. Supreme, the skate brand founded in 1994, took the white-word-on-red-box logo from her, which its founder James Jebbia has acknowledged, and when a related trademark fight reached court Kruger dismissed all parties as uncool jokers and said she was waiting for them to sue her for copyright infringement. Critics ask whether a critique survives that kind of absorption. Her own position has been that the work operates inside the culture it addresses, because there is no outside.

She has taught for decades, at the Whitney's independent study program, at CalArts, at Berkeley, for five years at San Diego, and then at UCLA, where she is Distinguished Professor Emerita of New Genres and where a long roster of working artists sat in her classes. In 2005 the Venice Biennale gave her the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement. The installations have grown large enough to swallow rooms. Belief+Doubt, placed in the lower level of the Hirshhorn Museum in 2012, wraps 6,700 square feet of floor, walls and ceiling in red, white and black text. She is 81 and still working, and the argument about what the work does is not finished.

Barbara Kruger's life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.

• Picture/Readings artwork
  Photographs of modest houses alternating with panels of words 1979
• Untitled (When I hear the word Culture I take out my Checkbook) artwork
  The ventriloquist's dummy — sold for 902,500 dollars in 2011 1985
• Untitled (I shop therefore I am) artwork
  Descartes rewritten as a shopping receipt 1987
• Untitled (Your body is a battleground) artwork
  Made for the 1989 march on Washington for reproductive rights 1989
• Picture This artwork
  200-foot sculptural letters for an amphitheater at the North Carolina Museum of Art 1995
• Belief+Doubt artwork
  Permanent installation wrapping 6,700 square feet of the Hirshhorn 2012

• January 26, 1945 aged 0 Born in Newark to a chemical technician and a legal secretary
• 1965 aged ~20 Enters Parsons after a single year at Syracuse She left Syracuse when her father died. At Parsons she studied with Diane Arbus and Marvin Israel.
• 1973 aged ~28 Shows sewn and crocheted wall hangings in the Whitney Biennial The craft-based work she later abandoned as meaningless to her.
• 1979 aged ~34 First shows text laid over appropriated photographs, at P.S.1
• 1983 aged ~38 First institutional solo show, at the ICA in London
• 1989 aged ~44 Your body is a battleground appears at the march on Washington A billboard version went up in Ohio the following year and drew an immediate rebuttal on the next hoarding.
• 1999 aged ~54 First full retrospective opens at MOCA in Los Angeles It travelled to the Whitney the following year.
• 2005 aged ~60 Receives the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement at the Venice Biennale
• 2012 aged ~67 Belief+Doubt opens at the Hirshhorn Floor, walls and ceiling in red, white and black.

• Diane Arbus 1923–1971
  Photographer whose square-format portraits remade American documentary photography studied with
• Cindy Sherman b. 1954
  Photographed herself as hundreds of other women and insisted that none of it was a self-portrait. peer
• Jeff Koons b. 1955
  Sculptor of Rabbit, Balloon Dog and Michael Jackson and Bubbles exhibited alongside
• Andy Warhol 1928–1987
  Pop art pioneer whose Campbell's soup cans and celebrity portraits defined contemporary American art. precursor
• Robert Mapplethorpe 1946–1989
  Photographer whose retrospective set off the 1989 fight over public arts funding contemporary