As protesters swarmed downtown Los Angeles to denounce ICE raids of their communities and the deployment of the Nationwide Guard, a potent picture stored flashing throughout tv screens and social media: officers in riot gear going through off towards flag- and sign-waving demonstrators in entrance of a strikingly resonant, crimson mural posing a sequence of queries interrogating the very nature of energy and management.
Barbara Kruger’s 30-by-191-foot “Questions” takes up your entire facet wall of the Museum of Modern Artwork’s Geffen Modern warehouse constructing, going through Temple Road and — notably — the Edward R. Roybal Federal Constructing. Like a lot of Kruger’s most iconic photographs, together with her well-known 1989 abortion rights poster, “Your Body Is a Battleground,” the mural options phrases in starkly clear graphic design — on this case, white letters on a crimson background asking 9 now-prophetic questions:
“Who is beyond the law? Who is bought and sold? Who is free to choose? Who does the time? Who follows orders? Who salutes longest? Who prays loudest? Who dies first? Who laughs last?”
The mural was commissioned in 1990 by former MOCA curator Ann Goldstein, who’s now on the the Artwork Institute of Chicago.
Former MOCA Chief Curator Paul Schimmel posted a TV screenshot of protesters in entrance of the mural on Sunday with the caption, “#Barbara Krugers #moca mural doing its art job as the riots against #ice consume LA.”
Reached for remark Monday, Schimmel added that Kruger “understood the importance and power of a mural facing the then-new Federal Building. Multiple generations of MOCA staff have brought it back to life because of its profundity.”
In a YouTube video posted to MOCA’s web site when the museum reinstalled the mural in 2018, Kruger says: “There was a very visible wall on the side of this building, and it was an opportunity to make a statement about pride and prominence and power and control and fear. The questions were always the important part of the work.”
At one other level within the video, she provides: “One would hope that in the 30 years since, things would have changed a bit. And things have changed. For the good and for the bad, and for everything in between.”
Photos of “Questions” abound on social media, together with on X, the place just a few customers acknowledged the importance of the artwork behind the protesters. Misinformation has been rampant on social media, and one publish confirmed a photograph of a masked particular person creeping beneath the mural with the declare that the individual “broke into the MOCA Museum and destroyed everything.”
A MOCA consultant debunked that declare Monday, saying that the museum closed early, at about 1:30 p.m. Sunday, “out of an abundance of caution and for the safety and well-being of our staff and visitors,” and that it anticipated to open once more, per its regular working hours, on Thursday. The museum is all the time closed Monday by way of Wednesday.
The one harm to the Geffen Modern was some graffiti that the museum mentioned may very well be eliminated.
Cleanup continues after an evening of protests in downtown Los Angeles on June 9, 2025.
(Damian Dovarganes / Related Press)
Including a hyper-meta artwork second, MOCA’s present durational efficiency, “Police State” by Pussy Riot frontwoman Nadya Tolokonnikova, continued till 6 p.m. contained in the constructing, simply with out its typical stay viewers. The efficiency consists of Tolokonnikova sitting at a naked wood desk within a corrugated metal construction resembling a Russian jail cell.
Tolokonnikova, who spent two years in a Russian jail following a efficiency in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, spent these hours Sunday broadcasting stay audio of the protests exterior blended together with her personal heartbeat to the empty museum.
“Police State Exhibit Is Closed Due To The Police State,” she wrote in a publish on X.
“Durational performance is a scary thing to step into: once you said you’re going to show up, you can’t just leave simply because of the National Guard had a whim to occupy the city, so my choice was to stay and continue doing my job as an artist,” she mentioned in a press release.
