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. "What to see in L.A. galleries: Hot-button greeting cards, mesmerizing photograms," Los Angeles Times, November 28, 2016. Retrieved March 14, 2022.Knight, Christopher. "Erika Rothenberg's Delights of Dissent," 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, Michelle "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.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 Art Untitled (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 (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. Gallery (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. Review, Los Angeles Times, March 25, 1988. Retrieved March 14, 2022. and group shows at Franklin Furnace, Artists Space, White Columns and The Alternative Museum, among others.Brenson, Michael. Review, The New York Times, January 6, 1984. Retrieved March 14, 2022.Brenson, Michael. "A View of News Manipulation," The New York Times, March 22, 1985. Retrieved March 14, 2022. New Museum director Marcia Tucker 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. "Bad Girls: Feminism on Wry," 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, among others. In a 2003 lawsuit, she inadvertently outed herself as "Kathe Kollwitz", one of the leaders of the Guerrilla Girls, 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 CollectionRyzik, Melena. "The Guerrilla Girls, After 3 Decades, Still Rattling Art World Cages," 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. "Dynamically capturing the feminist spirit," Los Angeles Times, March 13, 2007. Retrieved March 11, 2022. Los Angeles Times critic Christopher Knight 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. "How Identity Politics Conquered the Art World. An oral history," 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 and performance artist John Malpede for the Creative Time-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. "Art on the Beach 6," Programs. Retrieved March 14, 2022.Melvin, Tessa. "Arts Group to Fight Rejection of Sculpture," 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 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 Travis "The story of public art in New York City," Apollo, November 20, 2018. Retrieved March 14, 2022.
Greeting cards and church signboards (Since 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, Patricia."Erika Rothenberg," Artforum, August 1992. Retrieved March 14, 2022.Curtis, Cathy. "Erika Rothenberg Sends Subversive, Sarcastic Messages in Her 'Cards,'" 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. Artforum'''s 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."