notes.husk.org/likes images.

Top, photograph by Gary Leonard, National Guard troops at First and Alameda. A Barbara Kruger mural is legible on the wall of The Museum of Contemporary Art in the background, Los Angeles, California, May 2, 1992. Via. Bottom, photograph by Jay L Clendenin/Getty Images, National Guard troops beneath Barbara Kruger’s Untitled (Questions), 1990/2018, June 2025. Via.

WHO IS BEYOND THE LAW? WHO IS BOUGHT AND SOLD? WHO IS FREE TO CHOOSE? WHO DOES TIME? WHO FOLLOWS ORDERS? WHO SALUTES LONGEST? WHO PRAYS LOUDEST? WHO DIES FIRST? WHO LAUGHS LAST?

Untitled (Questions) was always a protest of its own, though it didn’t initially have much to do with Trump. The mural was commissioned by MOCA in 1989 and was initially meant to feature the text of the Pledge of Allegiance. Even though Kruger began conceiving the work two years prior, the gesture seemed to refer obliquely to conservative handwringing in 1988 over attempts to keep the Pledge of Allegiance out of classrooms, with George H. W. Bush, then vice president under Ronald Reagan, claiming that such a gesture was unconstitutional. One Republican representative’s spokesperson told the Los Angeles Times in 1989 that Kruger seemed like “a left-winger blowing off smoke.”

Alex Greenberger, from This Barbara Kruger Mural from 1990 Has Become the Year’s Most Poignant Artwork, for artNews, June 12, 2025.

See also, Carolina A. Miranda, In advance of the midterms, Barbara Kruger reprises MOCA mural that asks ‘Who is beyond the law?’, for the LA Times, October 18, 2018.