Barbara Kruger

A seminal volume celebrating the career of influential American artist Barbara Kruger, made in collaboration with the artist.

Bold, philosophical, radical, subversive: the art of Barbara Kruger focuses on decoding the social-psychological messages embedded in popular culture. Marrying pictures to words in a variety of media and sites, Kruger raises issues of power politics, sexuality, and representation. Borrowing slogans and phrases from the lexicon of thought, and using the potent weapon of pure graphics, Kruger’s art offers up powerfully distilled messages of word and image. This beautifully designed book is the most comprehensive volume on Kruger’s body of work to date. The book explores her work over the past thirty years, including many previously unpublished works. Aptly designed to embody a manifesto-like aesthetic, the book also presents bold spreads of the artist’s large-scale works and public projects, which confront such controversial and weighty topics as abortion, consumerism, spirituality, and identity.

Barbara Kruger has been active in the fields of video and audio installation, photography, sculpture, architecture, and graphic design, as well as in critical writing and curatorial work. She has had numerous solo and group shows and is currently Professor of Art in the Department of Art at UCLA. Alex Alberro is Virginia Bloedel Wright Associate Professor of Art History at Barnard College. Hal Foster is Townsend Martin ‘17 Professor of Art & Archaeology and Department Chair at Princeton University. Martha Gever is a cultural critic and former editor of The Independent Film and Video Monthly. Miwon Kwon is Professor of Art History at UCLA. Carol Squiers is Curator at the International Center of Photography, New York.