We Will Not Become What We Mean to You

Description

Barbara Kruger’s photo- and text-based images disrupt representations of power generated by commercial media, particularly those that affect women. Informed by her earlier profession as a graphic designer, her work typically combines images and iconography appropriated from 1940s and 1950s American film, television, and advertising with blunt slogans rife with insinuation. Kruger explained, “I’m interested in how identities are constructed, how stereotypes are formed, how narratives sort of congeal and become history.” Here the artist removed the identifying features of the figure and used the pronouns we and you to implicate the viewer, regardless of gender, in the objectification of this anonymous woman.

We Will Not Become What We Mean to You

Barbara Kruger

1983

Accession Number

184209

Medium

Gelatin silver print

Dimensions

184 × 121 × 5 cm (72 1/2 × 48 × 2 in.)

Classification

photograph

Museum

The Art Institute of Chicago

Chicago, United States

Credit Line

Gift of Susan and Lewis Manilow