LOS ANGELES — In 1985, Los Angeles County Museum of Art curator Kathleen McCarthy Gauss organized a series of exhibitions exploring new ways in which photography was being deployed in art. Among the seven featured artists was a former Mademoiselle magazine graphic designer who had landed in Los Angeles at the end of the previous decade for a teaching gig. That artist was Barbara Kruger and the series, "New American Photography," was significant for her — one of her earliest solo museum presentations.
In those days, Kruger was producing small-scale pieces that, in form and technique, borrowed from her graphic designer career. Her paste-ups — a term borrowed from the language of magazine layouts in the days before desktop publishing — consisted of found images over which hovered words and fragments of texts, often in a punchy sans serif font.
"HOW COME ONLY THE UNBORN HAVE THE RIGHT TO LIFE?" demands a text placed over a negative image of a child's face. Another piece from the mid-1980s shows a canine's snarling teeth and the deadpan line, "Business as usual."
