Barbara Kruger in D.C.

BY: Howard Karren

The dramatic tower of I.M. Pei’s East Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., had been closed for renovations for nearly three years. On September 30, it re-opened with a dazzling new exhibition of the works of Barbara Kruger, which is open to the public (and free) through January 22.

Kruger, born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1945, was a classmate of Diane Arbus’s at Parsons School of Design and worked as a graphic designer at Condé Nast in the 1970s. In the ’80s, she emerged as conceptual artist in the feminist art movement of the time, and since then her artwork—typically black-and-white photographic images, some as large as a billboard, with stripes of provocatively worded type on top of them—has become highly prized, one piece selling for nearly $1 million at a recent auction. The National Gallery calls her work “figures in profile over which Kruger has superimposed her striking figures of speech to create arresting conceptual works of great visual power.” And Kruger herself has said, “In my work I am interested in an alternation between implicit and explicit, between ingratiation and criticality. I also think about assumption, disbelief and authority, but there are no ‘correct’ readings.” Here, PROVOKR presents some of the art “In the Tower.”