The task of asking difficult questions in a public setting, whether implied or direct, has always been at the core of Kruger’s oeuvre. While the early work We don’t need another hero (1986) didn’t ask a question directly, it nevertheless challenged thousands of pedestrians who would have encountered the mysterious billboard where they might normally expect an advertisement. A nostalgic, apple-pie boy flexes his bicep, accompanied by a girl who reaches out to touch his arm, with an expression of surprise, or perhaps ironic awe. Mounted on seventeen billboards in fourteen cities across the UK and Ireland in January and February 1987, the work confronted the public with what looked like propaganda promoting cliched gender roles, overlaid by a command to reject the values promulgated by the image.

One of Kruger’s best known works, Untitled (Your body is a battleground) Poster for Arts Pro-Choice art sale and benefit for the National Abortion Rights Action League, New York City (1990) was designed for the 1989 Women’s March on Washington in support of legal abortion. In 1990 the posters were fly-posted across New York City. A direct, activist intervention in a civic space, Kruger’s characteristic black-and-white image overlaid with a slogan highlighted an acutely divisive subject in American politics at the time—and still today, if not an enduring issue across the globe.

Kruger is always alert to setting, and the same group of questions can resonate in different ways depending on the context in which they are installed. In 2003, Kruger redeployed some of the same questions she used on the façade of MOCA on the floor of St. Peter’s Church, Cologne, with an enormous photograph of a woman’s hands, her hands folded together in prayer. Across the space between her wrists, in her trademark white-on-red typography, there were four questions:

Wer salutiert am längsten? [Who salutes longest?]
Wer betet am lautesten? [Who prays loudest?]
Wer stirbt zuerst? [Who dies first?]
Wer lacht zuletzt? [Who laughs last?]

Presented in the hushed, spiritual setting of a Gothic church, the combination of the hands and the questions appeared less forthrightly political and more of a call to balance and compassion.

A decade later in the same German city, Kruger brought a similar set of questions directly to the street, enwrapping a Cologne city bus in a series of questions and statements, including WHERE ARE YOU GOING? WHO ARE YOU? AND WHAT MAKES YOU HAPPY? Bus Wrap travelled through the city as a kind of mobile call to prayer or expression of empathy for the residents of Cologne.

Public transportation was also the site of a project in Mexico City, when Kruger emblazoned a tunnel in the city’s Metro Bellas Artes subway station with her usual repertoire of statements and questions. Printed in the colors of the Mexican flag, Untitled (Empatia) greeted commuters with enormous letters on all sides, not least the ceiling. A cacophony of words and letters encircled the crowds as they strode through the nondescript passageways, a reflection of the hectic atmosphere of the setting.

Barbara Kruger’s appetite to ask tough questions and support political causes remains undimmed, and she continues to alter the very fabric of urban spaces, especially in her adopted hometown of Los Angeles, with a range of demanding installations. In 2017, she mounted the question CAN MONEY BUY YOU LOVE? in vast letters across the exterior of the Beverly Center, a conspicuous interrogation of consumerism on the façade of one of the city’s more prominent shopping centers.

For Frieze Los Angeles 2019, Untitled (Questions) (2019) saw dozens of eye-catching green stickers pop up seemingly at random on sidewalks and surfaces near a dozen Los Angeles art spaces, asking pedestrians WHO WILL WRITE THE HISTORY OF TEARS? and ARE YOU HUNGRY? alongside other questions. Untitled (Who is housed when money talks?) (2020) was created for the Rental Affordability Act campaign headquarters on Sunset Boulevard in January 2020 in response to the city’s escalating homelessness and housing crisis. Her questions were then revived and expanded to monumental effect the following month for Frieze Los Angeles 2020. Untitled (Questions) (2020) featured installations across LA on street banners, billboards and walls, and at Union Station and the Banc of California Stadium, among other prominent locations. Once again permeating public spaces from transportation hubs to sports arenas to major traffic intersections, Kruger’s questions usurped the usual locus of commercialism and advertising, and—as so many of her works have done before—urged viewers from all walks of life, including herself, to formulate their own answers to them.