Justice, 1997

In 1997 Barbara Kruger created four fiberglass statues of key iconic figures in compromising poses to address the unexamined constructions of history and the problematic place of public monuments. Questioning who is honored and why, Justice depicts notorious American lawyer Roy Cohn (1927–1986) wearing heels and draped in an American flag while kissing former Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation J. Edgar Hoover (1895–1972). Kruger chose an intimate embrace to contrast her subjects’ homophobic, racist, and anti-democratic policies—a choice the artist described as “trying to break down the sanctity around the rallying calls for ‘justice’ and ‘family’ and deal with the complex contradiction of public and private lives.”