New York City
November 2017
November 1–19, 2017 For Performa 17, the conceptual artist Barbara Kruger creates a series of dynamic interventions across New York City, both site-specific and itinerant. This collection of work is the artist’s first major project in New York in eight years. Two of Kruger’s mobile works in the series include 50,000 MTA metrocards, each emblazoned with four critical, biting questions set in the artist’s signature-style text, and Untitled (School), a wrapped school bus that can be seen around the city and parked outside various Performa venues. Grounded in activism, feminism, and community, Kruger’s signature text is reproduced on a large-scale vinyl format, covering the bus’s forty-foot-long shell. Barbara Kruger’s concurrent site-specific pieces include a billboard entitled Untitled (Know, Believe, Forget) at 10th Avenue and 17th Street and an installation, Untitled (Skate), in Coleman Skatepark under the Brooklyn Bridge. Created in partnership with NYC Parks and skate-park designer Steve Rodriguez, Kruger employs her signature effects and strategies to broadcast messages that engage issues of and ideas about power, desire, adoration, contempt, and capital at New York’s most popular skate park. As part of her first-ever performance, Kruger staged a stylized merchandise “drop” in SoHo, working on notions of appropriation, power, and consumerism. Playbill
