Erika Rothenberg

Erika Rothenberg, House of Cards, installation of 90 satirical greeting cards, 1992, Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Erika Rothenberg is a Los Angeles–based conceptual artist whose work has included painting, drawing and photography, public art, sculpture and installation. 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. 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."

Rothenberg has exhibited at venues including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), New Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA), Hirshhorn Museum, and Documenta IX. Her work belongs to the public collections of MoMA, LACMA, MCA Chicago, and Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (Ghent), 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. W.P.A. (Washington) and Rosamund Felsen Gallery (Los Angeles), and group shows at Franklin Furnace, Artists Space, White Columns and The Alternative Museum, among others. 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. 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." 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. Both popular and controversial, it was vandalized twice by visitors who broke the window and looted most of the goods, which Rothenberg replaced. 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. it was also part of the Museum of the City of New York exhibition, "Art in the Open," in 2017.

Greeting cards and church signboards (Since 1991) Erika Rothenberg, America, A Shining Beacon to the World, Aluminum and felt case, plastic letters, 2018. 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. Reviews characterized the ongoing relevance of the greeting cards as "dismayingly timeless" observations that testified to their original astuteness. Nancy Princenthal described the signboards as indictments of both organized religion and the growing role of disorders in American self-definition and social involvement. 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. 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," 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). Christopher Knight ranked it "among the best public art projects in L.A.," one that gave "surprising new life" to pop clichés. FAE Musée d'Art Contemporain (Lausanne), Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Rose Art Museum, Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (Ghent), and Walker Art Center, among others. She has been awarded grants from Art Matters (1990), the Norton Family Foundation (1990), and the Getty Center (1993).