Design Matters Today with Barbara Kruger

Joining me on todays broadcast of Design Matters is Barbara Kruger.

Barbara Kruger is an artist, a writer and a photographer. She attended Syracuse University and the School of Visual Arts where she was taught by Diane Arbus and Marvin Israel. A graphic designer and art director for Harper’s Bazaar in the 1960s, she then went on to become an art director at Mademoiselle magazine.

Ms. Kruger’s 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. As well as appearing in museums and galleries worldwide, Kruger’s work has appeared on billboards, bus cards, posters, a public park, a train station platform in Strasbourg, France, and in 2005 Kruger was honored at the 51st Venice Biennale with the "Golden Lion" for Lifetime Achievement.

For the past decade Kruger has created installations comprised of video, film, audio and projection. Enveloping the viewer with the seductions of direct address, her work is consistently about the kindnesses and brutalities of social life: about how we are to one another. Ms. Kruger is currently a professor at the University of California at Los Angeles.

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