Each year, the Museum’s Education department invites one artist to take part in the program, encouraging them to create and implement a project of their choosing. The artist has the freedom to select the audience they wish to work with and develop the focus and format of the project. As part of her project, Whose Values?, Kruger will engage with LAUSD Title I high schools on a series of art, writing, and critical thinking projects.
“This is an extraordinary opportunity to expose high school students to the artistic philosophy of one of the world’s most well-known and respected artists,” says Toby Tannenbaum, assistant director for education at the J. Paul Getty Museum. “Barbara has, from the beginning, been an enthusiastic and involved participant in developing the program, and we look forward to this year’s student projects.”
Kruger is an artist who is known for her large-scale and immersive image, text, and video installations that address provocative social, cultural, and political issues. For Whose Values?, she will join forces with 11th and 12th graders from Grover Cleveland High School’s Humanities Magnet and Academy of Art and Technology, as well as 12th graders from Chatsworth High School’s Humanitas Academy of Education and Human Services. Working with staff in the Museum’s Education department and educators from the participating schools, Kruger will engage in small and large-format discussions and activities supporting collaborative art and writing projects connected to core curricular themes of social justice, identity, race, gender and advocacy.
“The Getty Artists Program is an opportunity for me to encourage students to try to visualize, musicalize, and textualize their experience in the world,” says Kruger. “I know that this creation of commentary can change lives, encourage ambition, and suggest the pleasure of learning.”
The project will kick off on November 12, 2014, when Kruger speaks to participating students at Grover Cleveland High School, and will continue in 2015 with a culminating event in the spring.
Past Getty Artists Program participants have included Mark Bradford (2010), Jennifer Steinkamp (2011), John Divola (2012), and Sam Durant (2013).
About Barbara Kruger
Barbara Kruger (American, born 1945) is an artist living in Los Angeles and New York. She attended Syracuse University‘s School of Visual Arts and Parson’s School of Design in New York before working in magazine design and art direction at numerous publications, including Mademoiselle, House and Garden and Aperture. Her work offers evocative statements about power, sexuality, money, life and death.
Kruger’s work has been exhibited internationally at several museums including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA). Kruger’s work has also appeared in several public spaces, including billboards, buses, posters, parks, and museum facades. She has taught at California Institute of the Arts, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and University of California, Berkeley, and is currently a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her work has been most recently exhibited at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and Kunsthaus Bregenz in Austria.
About the Schools
Chatsworth Charter High School’s Humanitas Academy of Education and Human Service is a small learning community that has been developed by expanding the highly successful Humanitas Program that has existed for more than 20 years. The Humanitas Academy helps students gain an understanding of the socioeconomic, psychological and political foundations of society and explore how to use that information to meet human needs through education and human services. Through curriculum concentrated on themes relating to education and human services, students develop their own identities and explore careers in teaching, social work, special needs, psychology, health, counseling and public service.
Established in 1981, Cleveland Humanities Magnet High School is the leading secondary school for the study of the Humanities in Los Angeles, and the model for Humanitas programs across the district. The magnet has a population of over 850 students with a broad range of diversity in terms of race, ethnicity, and socio-economic background. This provides the opportunity to cultivate the development of critical thinkers through an interdisciplinary, thematic, writing-based Humanities curriculum and to foster an environment of social awareness and involvement in order to improve students’ lives and their local, national, and global communities. In the 11th grade, in particular, teachers use a Social Justice approach to American Studies. The aim is to question, research, and mutually discover ways to use power creatively and multi-dimensionally in pursing the ideals of Democracy for all members of our society.
The Academy of Art and Technology is a small learning community that is art-centered and focused on a technology-based education. Students participating in the Academy’s four-year program are trained in Graphic Design, Web Design and Illustration aspects of the Commercial Art profession. Through its rigorous interdisciplinary curriculum, AOAT delivers connected and engaging academic courses that meet all the A-G requirements and provides access to honors sections and Advanced Placement classes. The program also focuses on transferrable skills that are critical for student success during high school and after graduation, including communication skills, teamwork, problem solving, critical thinking, and time management. The goal is to provide students with the academic background and professional tools necessary for success in any endeavor. AOAT instills all students with a love of learning, civic responsibility and the individual confidence to achieve their personal best.