Erika Rothenberg

[1][2] 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.

[25][26][27][2] Rothenberg's style has been described as "user-friendly,"[4] employing concise, deadpan prose and emblematic, often hand-painted imagery in unconventional contexts—fake ads, billboards, window displays, newspaper inserts—in order to examine American ideology, mass culture, and taboo subjects.

[5][3][1][28] 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.

"[4] Leah Ollman placed Rothenberg among a long line of contemporary social satirists—from Barbara Kruger to Stephen Colbert—"spearing the status quo" with work that "induces cringes, queasy laughter and sighs of every stripe—pain, shame, outrage.

[29][17][2] Based on advertising strategies, the series employed bright colors, friendly faces and a relentless tone of upbeat cheeriness in order to examine intersections between American exceptionalism and consumerism through the creation of products with a moral conscience.

[29][30][17] Her products included "Sauce Against Racism" and "The Secret Penis"—hosiery that she supplemented with a sewn-in bulge designed to help women "feel equal" in the workplace; its tagline read: "A Woman Needs to Start At the Bottom In Order to Get to the Top!

[17] New York Times critic Michael Brenson wrote, "Rothenberg plunges us into the gap between appearance and reality ... there is a bleakness that suggests the view of America in the best works of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Joan Didion.

[31][9][32] 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.

"[34][35][36] 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.

[6][3][2] The Los Angeles show included the new work, One World So Many Ways It Could End (2015), a pedestal-based sculpture whose wheel viewers could spin to see sixteen end-of-the-world scenarios ranging from global warming and nuclear war to zombie apocalypse or alien invasion.

They often suggested droll indices of despair in the form of weeklong church activity listings (e.g., AA, teen suicide watch, and "parenting your clone" groups); the first, America’s Joyous Future, was exhibited at Documenta IX in 1992.

[5][44][45] 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.

[54] The Road to Hollywood consisted of fifty succinct, black and white marble mosaic-texts—funny, poignant and straightforward stories of how people got started in Hollywood—embedded in a winding "red carpet" at a shopping center adjacent to the Kodak Theatre, home to the Academy Awards.