LACMA’s Balch Art Research Library serves museum staff, visiting researchers, and the public by collecting and preserving a diverse collection of 240,000 art historical research materials. Our series Artists in Situ: Selections from LACMA’s Artist Files highlights our extensive collection of Artist and Gallery Ephemera, a subset of which is digitized and accessible online.
The files are made up of printed ephemera such as postcards, press releases, brochures, clippings, and posters related to an individual artist and their work. These archival materials have the capacity to provide insight into public perception surrounding artists’ works, and they can afford researchers a nuanced perspective of the historical art market. They are also often of artistic value in themselves, and often shed light on artists’ relationships to commerce and material ephemerality.
Alongside LACMA's current exhibition Barbara Kruger: Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You., on view through Sunday, July 17, we’re sharing selections from Kruger’s artist file, the materials within which have been fully digitized. Take a look at a few selections below and explore the full file of ephemera for in-depth look at the artist’s practice and career.
