PRESS AND REVIEWS

ARTFORUM SUMMER 2015
... She is a harsh social critic with a facility for image-making, language and design. Far from its comfortable home on Comedy Central or in the Onion, irony in Rothenberg’s hands is a barbed political weapon, and she wields it to underscore the very real injustices she observes in daily life.
-- MICHELLE GRABNER, Artforum (see full review below)

LA TIMES NOV 28 2016: REVIEW OF HOUSE OF CARDS AT CHARLIE JAMES GALLERY LOS ANGELES 
Rothenberg belongs to a long line of social satirists spearing the status quo. Among her closer relatives are Barbara Kruger and the Guerrilla Girls, cartoonist Roz Chast (herself a master of the barbed greeting card) and Stephen Colbert. Her work induces cringes, queasy laughter and sighs of every stripe — pain, shame, outrage. These are greeting cards that will never be sent, but they demand to be seen, and their messages received.
—Leah Ollman, Los Angeles Times

ARTSY SEPT 28, 2018
“Melding dark humor with marketing techniques Rothenberg has been building her critical and political brand of subversive art for over 40 years. Courting controversy and critiquing patriarchal norms are hallmarks of her practice, and she’s always had an activist streak. You try to make it deep and impactful and push it as much as you can,” Rothenberg said of the resolute political streak running through her entire career. So the fact that Rothenberg’s oeuvre continues to stand the test of time is a credit to her acerbic, prescient vision of the United States. But it also suggests that the nation tends to subjugate or sideline anyone who doesn’t look like its Founding Fathers. “My work,” she said, “has always been a portrait of America.” —Alex Wexelman, Artsy

[Her} real subject is America [with] a bleakness that suggests the view of America in the best works of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Joan Didion
— Michael Brenson, The New York Times

Hits home with shattering effect — James Yood, Art in America

Rothenberg is one in a long line of artists to paint a bleak picture beneath America’s glamorous façade, but if anything, looking on the installation with two decades of globalisation and mass networked communication behind us, many of the subjects resonate not just with the U.S but with issues worldwide. In a rather last chance saloon way, just as the repetition of jibes from the witty to the sickening is subsiding, the final category in the House of Cards installation is ‘Hope’ – the freedom to critique through satire and art, to have a voice and be able to laugh with it, is the saving grace to the horrible proliferation of stuff that happens in the world, and in ‘House of Cards’ Rothenberg uses it to hilarious and damning effect. —This Tomorrow 

A re-creation of Erika Rothenberg’s 1992 House of Cards installation, which debuted at MoMA, takes aim at social ills, and it feels fresh as ever—unfortunately. Rothenberg’s satirical Hallmark-style greeting cards address uncomfortable subjects like war (“Sorry my country bombed your country”), discrimination (“Thanks, boss! For your affirmative actions!”), and even the art world (“Congratulations… for being one of the few people who understand Modern art”). “The 90 hand-painted greeting cards are a compendium of every awful, ignorant thing we do to one another,” wrote the artist in a statement. Other cards are aimed at rapists, pedophile priests, and homophobes. The message is clear: don’t stay silent on difficult topics. —Chicago Magazine

One of the art world's finest satirists —Fred Camper, Chicago Reader

One of L.A.'s best and most prickly artists —Clayton Campbell, Flash Art

Darkly effective... Downright diabolical —Christopher Knight, Los Angeles Times

Rothenberg increasingly confronts not just the agencies of institutionalized greed but also the yearning for self-definition that even conscientious indiviudals bring to their relations with the commercial media. —Nancy Princenthal, Art in America 

A profoundly moving exhibit about a subject that most often provokes denial or a turning away —Michael T. Kaufman, The New York Times, writing about Suicide Notes

An exceptional work of public art…it ranks among the best public art projects in L.A. —Christopher Knight, The Los Angeles Times writing about “The Road to Hollywood”

Praise for “Freedom of Expression National Monument”: 
The need for such a public platform has never been greater than it is now —Herbert Muschamp, The New York Times
Anyone who wants to can mount the platform and speak his or her mind. Try it. It’s an American tradition, to be exercised in the art world and everywhere else —Roberta Smith, The New York Times