Barbara Kruger did New York magazine’s post-Roe cover art
"If the end of Roe has come as a shock to anyone, that means they haven’t been paying attention"
Artist Barbara Kruger updated one of her most famous works for the cover of New York magazine’s May 9–22, 2022 issue about the likely end of Roe v. Wade.
The cover uses the same photo of a woman split into positive and negative exposures that Kruger used in her famous 1989 “Untitled (Your Body is a Battleground)” with a new message written on red in her trademark font, Futura Bold Oblique: “Who Becomes a “MURDERER’ in Post-Roe America?”
“The question, ‘Who becomes a ‘murderer’ in post-Roe America?’ — and I put murderer in quotes for a reason; it is the discourse of the right — is really the crux of the issue that few on the right have the candor to ask or answer. Who is punished in a world where abortion is ‘murder’?” Kruger told New York.
“Untitled (Your Body is a Battleground)” was created for the 1989 Women’s March on Washington in support of abortion rights and it’s now on view at the Broad in Los Angeles. In 2020, a Polish version of the poster went up as part of a campaign in Szczecin, Poland, in protest of abortion restrictions.
Kruger said Roe being overturned shouldn’t be a surprise.
“If the end of Roe has come as a shock to anyone, that means they haven’t been paying attention,” she said. “The left and center are asleep at the wheel of a slow-moving car crash and have not addressed the issue with forthrightness.”