After studying art at the University of Chicago and the School of Visual Arts in New York, Rothenberg worked as an Art Director for about eight years at McCann Erickson, where her clients included The New York Times Company, Keds Sneakers, NBC TV and Coca-Cola. Her work experience fed her artistic practice which tweaks Advertising's strategies, directness and reach, enabling her to "create social and political commentary with wit." Los Angeles collector Stuart Spence notes that "Erika says things that need to be said and is seldom said as strongly." When presented in store windows or on billboards, her work's accessibility has not only sparked debates, but has attracted vandals and bishops alike. In 2003 Rothenberg outed herself during a lawsuit as "Kathe Kollwitz", one of the de facto leaders of the Guerrilla Girls
Exhibition Highlights
Early Work
For "Atomic Salon" at Ronald Feldman Gallery, she exhibited a cardboard simulation of a nuclear missile bunker that included control buttons offering employees a choice between "Launch" and "Lunch."
Morally Superior Products 1980–1990
In addition to publishing Morally Superior Products: A New! Idea for Advertising, she printed advertising storyboards for Progresso, the sauce that fights racism and Right to Life Chicken. For her first solo exhibition at P*P*O*W, Michael Brenson noted a bleakness "that suggests the view of America in the best works of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Joan Didion."
In 2003, then ‘‘New York Times’’ architecture critic Herbert Muschamp recommended that a 1984 public work, originally commissioned by Creative Times for Art on the Beach, be rebuilt at Ground Zero in lieu of the then proposed Freedom Museum. And the next year, Creative Time reinstated the Freedom of Expression National Monument, a collaboration between Rothenberg, architect Laurie Hawkinson and activist John Malpede, Founder-Director of Los Angeles Poverty Department. During the 2004 election season, it occupied Foley Square surrounded by several Manhattan courthouses.
Narratives 1987-2008
Rothenberg’s Monument to a Bear is on permanent display outside Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego in La Jolla, California. This sculpture memorializes a bear with burnt paws that was rescued by firefighters only to end up legally hunted soon after he was released into the wild. For Everyone Who Sat in this Chair, also from this series, she adorned a chair with photos of the scores of people who once sat on it..
Fame and (Un)Fame 1988-2001
Regarding Santa Barbara’s 1988 "Home Show," Rothenberg wrote, "I turned the Waidner’s family room into an Anti-Media Room – with paintings satirizing viewing habits and a special device designed to give ordinary people the power and respect usually reserved for people on the air: The Celebrity Simulator.... If you want your family and friends to pay attention to what you say, now you can say it on TV, right in your own home." Commissioned to make a Los Angeles Metro Station for the Green Line's Lakewood Boulevard Station, Rothenberg produced The Wall of Un. A play on Hollywood's Walk of Fame, her wall immortalizes the names, handprints and footprints of over 650 residents of nearby communities Bellflower, Downey and Paramount. In 2001, Rothenberg completed a work for the Hollywood shopping center adjacent the Kodak Theatre, home to the annual Academy Awards. The Road to Hollywood: How Some of Us Got Here features actual stories of wannabes and some who made it, recorded in black and white marble mosaics, embedded in a winding red-concrete carpet.
America the Perfect Country 1980-1990
For her 1989 Newport Harbor Museum of Art exhibition "America the Perfect Country" she exhibited posters displaying quirky statistics about Americans that challenge the many myths underlying American ideology. The center piece was a putt putt golf game inviting players to choose the best country, though all but one option are blocked. Los Angeles Times critic Cathy Curtis credited Rothenberg for "co-opting the seductiveness of the very media Establishment whose quick fixes and intellectual pabulum she is out to discount."
Freedom of Expression Products 1989-1990
Her 1989 exhibition "Have You Attacked America Today?" in the New Museum's windows displayed pharmaceutical-like products meant to ease citizen dissent. Her game plan succeeded, since vandals tossed a metal garbage can through the window and looted most of these goods, which she replaced.
Signboards 1990–present
To date, she has produced three different signboards, each an edition of ten, announcing daily church activities that belie societal ills.
Greeting Card Works 1991-2015
For her 1992 Museum of Modern Art exhibition, "Projects 36: Erika Rothenberg," she exhibited House of Cards, which included 90 greeting cards, displayed alongside others the fit particular categories like Hope, Religion, Crime, Art and Culture, Sexual Abuse, Abortion, Civil Rights, Health, Education plus four more. In 2015, she exhibited an expanded version at Zolla|Lieberman Gallery in Chicago. Writing in ‘‘Artforum’’, Michelle Grabner described "irony in Rothenberg’s hands a barbed weapon, and she wields it to underscore the very real injustices she observes in daily life."
Death 1993-2015
"Bad Times," her 1995 exhibition in collaboration with Los Angeles costume designer Tracy Tynan at the Centre for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow, Scotland featured suicide notes appended to body bags. A local Bishop's calling for its boycott led to four BBC news programs focused on this ensuing controversy.
Sex Lives of Animals 1995-1998
For this series, Rothenberg juxtaposes enigmatic animal drawings with animal testimonies.
