Erika Rothenberg is a Los Angeles-based conceptual artist whose work has included painting, drawing and photography, public art, sculpture and installation.Freudenheim, Susan
"Casting a cold eye...,"
''Los Angeles Times'', March 25, 2005. Retrieved March 10, 2022.Wexelman, Alex
"Erika Rothenberg, the Ad Exec Who Turned Her Talents Toward Subervisive Art,"
''Artsy'', September 20, 2018. Retrieved March 10, 2022. Her art employs strategies and formats from mass media and persuasion, using words and images in familiar ways to present satirical, socially critical content, often with a subversive feminist point of view.Ollman, Leah

''Los Angeles Times'', November 28, 2016. Retrieved March 14, 2022.Knight, Christopher

''Los Angeles Times'', September 13, 1990. Retrieved March 14, 2022.Princenthal, Nancy. "Erika Rothenberg," ''Art in America'', July 1992. In 2015, ''Artforum'' writer Michelle Grabner called Rothenberg's ironic use of vernacular signage and marketing strategies "relentless," characterizing her as "a harsh social critic with a facility for image-making, language and design … irony in Rothenberg’s hands is a barbed political weapon, and she wields it to underscore the very real injustices she observes in daily life."Grabner, Michell
"Erika Rothenberg,"
''Artforum''. Summer 2015. Retrieved March 10, 2022. Rothenberg has exhibited at venues including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA),Museum of Modern Art
"Projects 36: Erika Rothenberg,"
Exhibitions. Retrieved March 10, 2022. Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA),Barron, Stephanie and Sheri Bernstein, Ilene Susan Fort
''Made in California: Art, Image, and Identity, 1900-2000''
Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000. Retrieved March 14, 2022. New Museum,Hess, Elizabeth. "Protest Art Vandalized at New Museum," ''Village Voice'', December 26, 1989. Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA), Hirshhorn Museum,Catlin, Roger
"Are You Buying What These Artists Are Selling?"
''Smithsonian Magazine'', February 26, 2018. Retrieved March 14, 2022. and

Documenta IX DOCUMENTA IX was the ninth edition of documenta, a quinquennial contemporary art exhibition. It was held between 13 June and 20 September 1992 in Kassel, Germany. The artistic director was Jan Hoet in collaboration with Bart de Baere, Denys ...

.Nachtigäller, Roland and Nicola von Velsen
''Documenta IX''
Stuttgart, Germany: Edition Cantz; New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1992. Retrieved March 14, 2022. Her work belongs to the public collections of MoMA, Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles,Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles
Erika Rothenberg
Artists. Retrieved March 10, 2022. LACMA,Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Ar
(Purple Bottle)'', Erika Rothenberg
Collections. Retrieved March 10, 2022. MCA Chicago,Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago
''America's Joyous Future''
Collection. Retrieved March 10, 2022. and

Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst The Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (commonly abbreviated as S.M.A.K., translated as ''City Museum for Contemporary Art'') is a relatively new museum located in Ghent, Belgium, and is renowned both for its permanent collection (Art & Languag ...

(Ghent),Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst
"From the Collection: Against the Wall?,"
Exhibitions, March 2018. Retrieved March 10, 2022. among others.

Education and early career

Rothenberg was born in New York City in 1950. She studied art at the University of Chicago until she was thrown out for participating in a student demonstration. After returning to New York in the early 1970s, she found work at the advertising agency McCann-Erickson; seeking to become an art director, she took a design night course at the School of Visual Arts and soon became the agency's first female in that position. She worked for eight years at the agency, for clients including Coca-Cola, NBC, Lufthansa and ''The New York Times'', while creating art in her off-time. Rothenberg began her art career in the late 1970s. She adapted her work experience to artmaking, melding dark humor and sociopolitical commentary with advertising's wide reach, directness, and blend of language and visuals.Laguna Art Museum
Erika Rothenberg
Collection. Retrieved March 10, 2022. In her first decade, she exhibited in solo shows at P.P.O.W. (New York),Linker, Kate
"Erika Rothenberg,"
''Artforum'', November 1987. Retrieved March 14, 2022. W.P.A. (Washington)Swisher, Kara
"Feminist Strokes at WPA,"
''The Washington Post'', April 20, 1987. Retrieved March 14, 2022. and Rosamund Felsen Gallery (Los Angeles),Wilson, William

''Los Angeles Times'', March 25, 1988. Retrieved March 14, 2022. and group shows at Franklin Furnace,

Artists Space Artists Space is a non-profit art gallery and arts organization first established at 155 Wooster Street in Soho, New York City. Founded in 1972 by Irving Sandler and Trudie Grace and funded by the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA), Artist ...

White Columns White Columns is New York City’s oldest alternative non-profit art space. White Columns is known as a showcase for up-and-coming artists, and is primarily devoted to emerging artists who are not affiliated with galleries. All work submitted is ...

and The Alternative Museum, among others.Brenson, Michael
Review
''The New York Times'', January 6, 1984. Retrieved March 14, 2022.Brenson, Michael

''The New York Times'', March 22, 1985. Retrieved March 14, 2022. New Museum director

Marcia Tucker Marcia Tucker (born Marcia Silverman; April 11, 1940 – October 17, 2006)Smith, Roberta ''The New York Times'' (October 19, 2006), Retrieved 23 November 2014. was an American art historian, art critic and curator. In 1977 she founded the New M ...

selected Rothenberg's work for "Not Just For Laughs: The Art of Subversion" (1980), the influential and divisive exhibition, " Bad Girls" (1994), and a 1989 solo exhibition.New Museum
Erika Rothenberg
People. Retrieved March 10, 2022.Glueck, Grace. "A Broader View of Feminism," ''The New York Observer'', February 7, 1994.Knight, Christopher

''Los Angeles Times'', February 8, 1994. Retrieved March 10, 2022. From the beginning, Rothenberg pursued socially committed art, participating in public projects organized by

Group Material Group Material was a group of conceptual artists and an exhibition space, active from 1979 to 1996, which included Jenny Holzer, Julie Ault, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, Félix González-Torres, Hans Haacke, and others as members and participants ...

, among others. In a 2003 lawsuit, she inadvertently outed herself as "Kathe Kollwitz", one of the leaders of the

Guerrilla Girls Guerrilla Girls is an anonymous group of feminist, female artists devoted to fighting sexism and racism within the art world. The group formed in New York City in 1985 with the mission of bringing gender and racial inequality into focus within t ...

, an artists collective that organized anonymously in 1985 (adopting the names of dead women artists as pseudonyms) to publicize and combat sexism, racism and corruption in the art world.Guerrilla Girls in Tate Modern Collection
/ref>Ryzik, Melena

''New York Times'', August 5, 2015. Retrieved June 26, 2018.Toobin, Jeffrey
"Girls Behaving Badly,"
''The New Yorker'', May 23, 2005. Retrieved March 11, 2022.

Work

Rothenberg's style has been described as "user-friendly," employing concise, deadpan prose and emblematic, often hand-painted imagery in unconventional contexts—fake ads, billboards, window displays, newspaper inserts—in order to examine American ideology, mass culture, and taboo subjects.Myers, Holly

''Los Angeles Times'', March 13, 2007. Retrieved March 11, 2022. ''Los Angeles Times'' critic

Christopher Knight Christopher or Chris Knight may refer to: Film and television *Christopher Knight (actor) (born 1957), American actor * Christopher Knight (filmmaker), blogger and filmmaker * Chris Knight (''Neighbours''), fictional character in the soap opera '' ...

wrote that her work combines accessibility and "a resonant conceptual side" informed by the often-ignored political dimension of Pop art, "engaging a diverse and wide-ranging audience in a consideration of their shared situation as citizens." Leah Ollman placed Rothenberg among a long line of contemporary social satirists—from Barbara Kruger to Stephen Colbert—"spearing the status quo" with work that "induces cringes, queasy laughter and sighs of every stripe—pain, shame, outrage."

Early work—1980s

Rothenberg first gained wide attention for her "Morally Superior Products" series (1980–90)—installations and storyboard paintings that promoted fictional companies and products, and comprised much of her first solo gallery exhibitions at P.P.O.W. in 1986 and 1987.Brenson, Michael
"Erika Rothenberg,"
''The New York Times'', March 28, 1986. Retrieved March 14, 2022. Based on advertising strategies, the series employed bright colors, friendly faces and a relentless tone of upbeat cheeriness in order to examine intersections between American exceptionalism and consumerism through the creation of products with a moral conscience.Brenson, Michael
"Erika Rothenberg,"
''The New York Times'', October 2, 1987. Retrieved March 14, 2022. Her products included "Sauce Against Racism" and "The Secret Penis"—hosiery that she supplemented with a sewn-in bulge designed to help women "feel equal" in the workplace; its tagline read: "A Woman Needs to Start At the Bottom In Order to Get to the Top!" ''Artforum'' critic Kate Linker described the work as "raunchy, rollicking, and deliberately unsubtle" in its political points. ''New York Times'' critic Michael Brenson wrote, "Rothenberg plunges us into the gap between appearance and reality ... there is a bleakness that suggests the view of America in the best works of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Joan Didion." Rothenberg's 1989 New Museum window display, ''Have You Attacked America Today?'', was described by director Marcia Tucker as "the most notorious exhibition" the museum hosted.McGee, Cecilia
"High Priestess of Trendiness,"
''The New York Times'', January 17, 1993. Retrieved March 14, 2022.Saltz, Jerry and Rachel Corbett

''Vulture'', April 2016. Retrieved March 14, 2022. The drugstore-like display offered tongue-in-cheek "Freedom of Expression Drugs" designed to facilitate citizen dissent (an anti-apathy ointment, "Offend" mouthwash, "Pro-Test" pills), a rewritten "Star-Spangled Banner," and flag-burning kits depicting fresh-faced, smiling adolescents subtly igniting American flags.Orr, Rachel
"10 women artists from the ’80s who helped define contemporary art,"
''The Lily'' (''Washington Post'', June 1, 2018. Retrieved March 10, 2022. Both popular and controversial, it was vandalized twice by visitors who broke the window and looted most of the goods, which Rothenberg replaced. The display was shown in Los Angeles in 1990 (along with a billboard work), and the products included in the Hirshhorn Museum show, "Brand New" (2018). During this period, Rothenberg also created her first major public art work, ''Freedom of Expression National Monument'' (1984), in collaboration with architect

Laurie Hawkinson Laurie Ann Hawkinson (born March 25, 1952) is an American architect. She worked at Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies and is a partner at Smith-Miller + Hawkinson Architects. Hawkinson is also a Professor of Architecture at Columbia Uni ...

and performance artist

John Malpede The Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD) is a Los Angeles-based performance group closely tied to the city's Skid Row neighborhood. Founded in 1985 by director and activist John Malpede, LAPD members are mostly homeless or formerly homeless peo ...

for the

Creative Time Creative Time is a New York-based nonprofit arts organization. It was founded in 1974 to support the creation of innovative, site-specific, socially engaged artworks in the public realm, particularly in vacant spaces of historical and architectura ...

-commissioned exhibition "Art on the Beach."Glueck, Grace
"Sculpture on the Sands of Battery Park City,"
''The New York Times'', July 13, 1984. Retrieved March 10, 2022.Creative Time

Programs. Retrieved March 14, 2022.Melvin, Tessa

''The New York Times'', December 7, 1986. Retrieved March 14, 2022. Inspired by early Soviet Agitprop, the monument consisted of a large red megaphone mounted atop a flight of stairs and pointed toward the Lower Manhattan skyline, inviting visitors to air their opinions and grievances.Muschamp, Herbert
"The New Ground Zero … With a Dubious Idea of 'Freedom,'"
''The New York Times'', August 31, 2003. Retrieved March 14, 2022. In 2003, ''New York Times'' architecture critic Herbert Muschamp proposed the project's reconstruction at Ground Zero. The following year, Creative Time re-presented it, this time facing the courthouses of

Foley Square Foley Square, also called Federal Plaza, is a street intersection in the Civic Center neighborhood of Lower Manhattan, New York City, which contains a small triangular park named Thomas Paine Park. The space is bordered by Worth Street to the ...

during American election season;Vogel, Carol
"Inside Art: A Vocal Expression,"
''The New York Times'', July 30, 2004. Retrieved March 14, 2022. it was also part of the Museum of the City of New York exhibition, "Art in the Open," in 2017.Rebecca Travi
"The story of public art in New York City,"
''Apollo'', November 20, 2018. Retrieved March 14, 2022.

Greeting cards and church signboards (1991– )

In the 1990s, Rothenberg began producing satirical, hand-painted works that mimicked the form and generic sentimentality of greeting cards while examining a range of social and political ills and injustices.Phillips, Patrici
"Erika Rothenberg,"
''Artforum'', August 1992. Retrieved March 14, 2022.Curtis, Cathy

''Los Angeles Times'', April 21, 1994. Retrieved March 10, 2022. She presented ninety of them in the greeting store-styled installation, ''House of Cards'' (1992, MoMA), each one employing the one-two punch strategy of typical cards—an innocuous cover with a gotcha line on the inside—displayed side-by-side. The installation was organized with section wall plaques reading "Abortion," "Politics," "Racism," "Religion," and "Sexual Abuse," among others. ''Artforums Patricia Phillips described the show as an assault "against the commercialization of feeling and our own complacency" that sought to "represent the space between silence and sensationalism." Rothenberg restaged the exhibition in expanded versions in 2015–18 at Zolla Lieberman (Chicago), Charlie James (Los Angeles) and Susan Inglett (New York). The Los Angeles show included the new work, ''One World So Many Ways It Could End'' (2015), a pedestal-based sculpture whose wheel viewers could spin to see sixteen end-of-the-world scenarios ranging from global warming and nuclear war to zombie apocalypse or alien invasion.Zellen, Jody
"Erika Rothenberg,"
''Artillery'', January 10, 2017. Retrieved March 14, 2022. Reviews characterized the ongoing relevance of the greeting cards as "dismayingly timeless" observations that testified to their original astuteness. In 1991, Rothenberg also began creating mock church signboards. They often suggested droll indices of despair in the form of weeklong church activity listings (e.g., AA, teen suicide watch, and "parenting your clone" groups); the first, ''America’s Joyous Future'', was exhibited at Documenta IX in 1992.Lovelace, Carey. "Girls, Girls, Girls," ''Art in America'', June, 2007, p. 89. Nancy Princenthal described the signboards as indictments of both organized religion and the growing role of disorders in American self-definition and social involvement. Rothenberg's work of this time gradually took on a more oblique position and included more sculptural elements.Yood, James
"Erika Rothenberg,"
''Artforum'', January 1992. Retrieved March 10, 2022.Nesbitt, Lois
"Erika Rothenberg,"
''Artforum'', January 1994. Retrieved March 14, 2022. ''Feeding Station'' (1992), for example, was a dense group of upturned, painted plywood profiles straining toward microphones dangling above them—a comment on country's growing need for public attention and psychic amplification.

Narrative works (1993– )

Rothenberg’s later work has explored subjects such as death, fame and gender relations, often taking on a more open-ended, narrative dimension inspired by news articles. Her collaboration with Tracy Tynan, "Suicide Notes" (1993–5, Rosamund Felsen, P.P.O.W., Centre for Contemporary Arts), presented seventeen messages left by real-life suicides, which they acquired from an LAPD source.Jinks, Peter. "Goodbye Cruel World. Hello Glasgow Art-Lovers," ''The Scotsman'', January 28, 1995. The artists rewrote the notes (also changing names) and attached them to body bags hung against the wall, accompanied by a booklet with assembled quotes and facts about suicide.Kaufman, Michael T

''The New York Times'', October 13, 1993. Retrieved March 14, 2022.Kapitanoff, Nancy

''Los Angeles Times'', February 28, 1993. Retrieved March 14, 2022. Reviews of the work were divided, with ''The New York Times'' calling it a "profoundly moving exhibit about a subject that most often provokes denial or a turning away," while others questioned whether it exploited or trivialized the subject.Kandel, Susan

''Los Angeles Times'', February 25, 1993. Retrieved March 10, 2022. ''Monument to a Bear'' (2002-3) was a concrete tombstone memorializing a bear cub burned in a fire, then rescued by firefighters and nursed back to health at a wildlife shelter before being released into the wild—only to be legally shot by a hunter. The sculpture re-created the cub's head and bandaged paws alongside a bronze plaque presenting the Associated Press story it derived from. Several projects offered what ''Art Issues'' called a "more gentle understanding" of gender issues.Forgács, Éva. "Erika Rothenberg," ''Art Issues'', January/February 1997, p. 38. Rothenberg's 1997 show at Rosamund Felsen included the ''Smoke Gets in Your Eyes'' series, which presented people's relationship stories—good, bad and ugly. "The Stravinskys" series (2005) explored fame and death through photographs of the gravesites of 20th-century composer

Igor Stravinsky Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky (6 April 1971) was a Russian composer, pianist and conductor, later of French (from 1934) and American (from 1945) citizenship. He is widely considered one of the most important and influential composers of the ...

and his wife Vera—identical except that his is strewn with gifts while hers is marked only by a bunch of dead flowers at its foot.

Public art

Rothenberg has completed public art commissions for Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington, DC, Hartford and Philadelphia.CRA/LA (Community Redevelopment Agency of Los Angeles)
Erika Rothenberg
Art Projects. Retrieved March 10, 2022.Andy Avalos, Andy

''Los Angeles Times'', August 11, 1990. Retrieved March 14, 2022.Womack, Catherine
"Demolition begins on an acclaimed piece of L.A. public art,"
''Los Angeles Times'', September 6, 2021. Retrieved March 14, 2022. Notable projects in addition to Freedom of Expression National Monument (1984) include several billboard works (two for Art Against AIDS, 1989) and two City of Los Angeles-commissioned works: ''Wall of Un(Fame)''(1995) and ''The Road to Hollywood'' (2001).Peterson, Thair. "Wanted: Names, Prints for Station," ''Long Beach Press-Telegram'', August 17, 1993. ''The Wall of Un(Fame)'' was a play on the

Hollywood Walk of Fame The Hollywood Walk of Fame is a historic landmark which consists of more than 2,700 five-pointed terrazzo and brass stars embedded in the sidewalks along 15 blocks of Hollywood Boulevard and three blocks of Vine Street in Hollywood, Californ ...

, immortalizing the names, handprints and footprints of over 650 residents of nearby communities. ''The Road to Hollywood'' consisted of fifty succinct, black and white marble mosaic-texts—funny, poignant and straightforward stories of how people got started in Hollywood—embedded in a winding "red carpet" at a shopping center adjacent to the

Kodak Theatre The Eastman Kodak Company (referred to simply as Kodak ) is an American public company that produces various products related to its historic basis in analogue photography. The company is headquartered in Rochester, New York, and is incorpor ...

, home to the Academy Awards. The path led up to an oversized, period-styled, fiberglass daybed on an open patio overlooking the mythic

Hollywood Sign The Hollywood Sign is an American landmark and cultural icon overlooking Hollywood, Los Angeles, California. Originally the Hollywoodland Sign, it is situated on Mount Lee, in the Beachwood Canyon area of the Santa Monica Mountains. Spelling ...

.Knight, Christopher
"The 'Road' Daringly Traveled,"
''Los Angeles Times'', November 30, 2001. Retrieved March 10, 2022.Ryzik, Melena and Jim Rutenberg, Rachel Abrams

''The New York Times'', October 16, 2017. Retrieved March 14, 2022. Christopher Knight ranked it "among the best public art projects in L.A.," one that gave "surprising new life" to pop clichés. In 2020, despite preservation efforts and press outcry, new owners demolished the work as part of a property makeover.

Collections and other recognition

Rothenberg's work belongs to numerous museum collections, including the

Art Institute of Chicago The Art Institute of Chicago in Chicago's Grant Park, founded in 1879, is one of the oldest and largest art museums in the world. Recognized for its curatorial efforts and popularity among visitors, the museum hosts approximately 1.5 mill ...

,I.C. Editions
Erika Rothenberg
Artists. Retrieved March 14, 2022. FAE Musée d'Art Contemporain (Lausanne), Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami,Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami
Erika Rothenberg
Permanent Collection. Retrieved March 10, 2022. Museum of Modern Art, New Museum, Orange County Museum of Art,Orange County Museum of Art
Erika Rothenberg
Collection. Retrieved March 10, 2022. Rose Art Museum,Rose Art Museum
Erika Rothenberg
Artists. Retrieved March 10, 2022. Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (Ghent), Tang Museum,Tang Museum
Erika Rothenberg
Collection. Retrieved March 10, 2022. and Walker Art Center,Walker Art Center
''America's Joyous Future'', Erika Rothenberg
Collection. Retrieved March 10, 2022. among others. She has been awarded grants from Art Matters (1990), the Norton Family Foundation (1990), and the Getty Center (1993).

References

External links

Erika Rothenberg websiteErika Rothenberg project
MoMA
Erika Rothenberg
Laguna Art Museum
Erika Rothenberg
artist page, Charlie James {{DEFAULTSORT:Rothenberg, Erika 20th-century American women artists 21st-century American women artists American conceptual artists Feminist artists Artists from New York City The High School of Music & Art alumni Living people 1955 births 20th-century American artists 21st-century American artists