part of the Getty Artists Project: Whose Values?
Summer 2015
Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Concieved and coordinated the interactive installation in collaboration with Barbara Kruger and the Getty Artists Project team from Getty Eudcation. General visitors to the Getty Center were invited to write their responses to four questions posed by Kruger--Whose Values? Whose Justice? Whose Fears? Whose Hopes?--printed on thousands of individual tags, and affix them to a wall-sized installation in the Getty Entrance Hall. This installation brought general visitors into dialogue with the questions that Kruger used to engage with area high school students in a variety of workshops.
Artist Barbara Kruger, the 2014/15 Getty Artists Program invitee, is internationally renowned for her large-scale and immersive image, text, and video installations that address provocative social, cultural, and political issues.
For her project, Whose Values?, Kruger joined forces with LAUSD Title I High Schools, specifically 400 students from Grover Cleveland High School's Humanities Magnet and Academy of Art and Technology, as well as Chatsworth High School's Humanitas Academy of Education and Human Services.
Working with students, teachers, and Getty staff, Kruger engaged in an extensive series of classroom discussions and activities supporting critical thinking as well as collaborative art and writing projects to investigate 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 resulting installation at the Getty Center (May 5–August 2, 2015) culminates this artist residency and highlights the students' collaborative and creative visualization of the Kruger's thought-provoking questions: Whose Values? Whose Justice? Whose Fears? Whose Hopes?
Photos: Sarah Waldorf.