1986

BARBARA KRUGER

Artist

tHE BROAD COLLECTION

My work has always been about power and how it circulates through culture, both globally and locally. People often see older works of mine and assume they were made in response to some recent event, but it’s not that they are particularly prescient. It’s just that drives toward damage and death, toward property and power, have been at work for centuries.

When the Broads first bought my paintings in the 1980s, it had a big impact on me as a young artist. I didn’t have a lot of collectors interested in my work at the time, and the Broads personally came into the gallery and bought works directly, as soon as they were made. But it wasn’t just their support, which all artists need; I was also appreciative of what they gravitated toward. They didn’t shy away from the hard stuff. Untitled (Your body is a battleground) (1989), Roy Toy (1986), and Untitled (Hate like us) (1994) concern the brutalities of power and its abuses. I thought those were really brave purchases. It was validating that the Broads wanted to invest in art that reflected the difficulties and complexities of social relations, and it made it clear to me that they weren’t playing around. Over the decades, they have built an impressive and vast collection, and through it I am glad to be in the company of so many brilliant artists, a number of whom also take on challenging subject matter.

By coincidence, I now teach undergraduate classes at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), in the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Center, and I walk past portraits of the Broads each day. Not all of my students will want to become full-time artists, but I hope they will all learn to be more vigilant about how they move through the world, about living an examined life, about putting an uncompromising value on knowledge, and, most important, about how to find their own voice. Because—let’s face it—too often, knowledge is incredibly devalued.

For those who do enter the arts, Los Angeles is a great art-school center, a fantastic museum town, and an increasingly complex global city. I’ve lived here almost thirty years now and have seen dynamic changes. Art students used to have to leave for New York or London. Now, nobody leaves. Eli Broad understood, a lot earlier than most people, that Los Angeles could become the kind of place it is today.