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Barbara Kruger, NYC MetroCards
“Who is healed? Who is housed? Who is silent? Who speaks?”
Art and the underground have long been riotous and well-suited bedfellows, and now the relationships is made all the more literal with Barbara Kruger-designed NYC MetroCards. The artist’s signature white lettering on an angry blood red background is now being used to pose questions to NYC commuters. Each card features a different provocative statement, and 50,000 of them were handed out at four subway stations around the city last Wednesday (November 1).
The cards’ texts echo statements from the artist’s previous works, such as “Who is healed? Who is housed? Who is silent? Who speaks?”, which references her 1991 Untitled, on which stripes of the American flag become such questions.
“These issues of power and control and physical damage and death and predation are ages old,” Kruger told the New York Times. “I wish some of these issues would become archaic.”
The cards were part of Kruger’s wider performative piece commission for Performa 17, the seventh edition of the performance-focused Biennial that runs until 19 November.