Jenny Holzer

Jenny Holzer (born July 29, 1950) is an American neo-conceptual artist, based in Hoosick, New York.

The main focus of her work is the delivery of words and ideas in public spaces and includes large-scale installations, advertising billboards, projections on buildings and other structures, and illuminated electronic displays.

Holzer was born on July 29, 1950 in Gallipolis, Ohio.

Originally aspiring to become an abstract painter, her studies included general art courses at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina (1968–1970), and then painting, printmaking and drawing at the University of Chicago before completing her BFA at Ohio University, Athens, Ohio (1972).

In 1974, Holzer took summer courses at the Rhode Island School of Design, and entered its MFA program in 1975.

She moved to Manhattan in 1976, joined the Whitney Museum's independent study program and began her first work with language, installation and public art.

She also was an active member of the artists group Colab.

Holzer is known as a neo-conceptual artist.

Most of her work is presented in public spaces and includes words and ideas, in the form of word art (also known as text art. ). The public dimension is integral to Holzer's work.

Her large-scale installations have included advertising billboards, projections on buildings and other architectural structures, and illuminated electronic displays.

LED signs have become her most visible medium, although her diverse practice incorporates a wide array of media including street posters, painted signs, stone benches, paintings, photographs, sound, video, projections, the Internet, T-shirts for Willi Smith, and a race car for BMW.

Holzer's initial public works, Truisms (1977–79), are among her best-known.

They first appeared as anonymous broadsheets that she printed in black italic script in capital letters on white paper and wheat-pasted to buildings, walls and fences in and around Manhattan.

These one-liners are a distillation of an erudite reading list from the Whitney Independent Study Program, where she was a student.

She printed other Truisms on posters, T-shirts and stickers, and carved them into stone benches.

Inflammatory Essays was a work consisting of posters Holzer created from 1979 to 1982 and put up throughout New York.

The statements on the posters were influenced by political figures including Emma Goldman, Vladimir Lenin, and Mao Tse-tung.

Holzer belongs to the feminist branch of a generation of artists that emerged around 1980, and was an active member of Colab during this time, participating in the famous The Times Square Show.

Holzer belongs to the feminist branch of a generation of artists that emerged around 1980, looking for new ways to make narrative or commentary an implicit part of visual objects.

She was an active member of Colab during this time, participating in the famous The Times Square Show.

Other female contemporaries include Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman, Sarah Charlesworth, and Louise Lawler.

The subject of Holzer's work often relates to feminism and sexism.

Her work discusses heavy subjects such as sexual assault against women.

She has said that she gravitates towards subjects such as this due to family dysfunction she has experienced and because she claims “we don't need work on joy.”

In late 1980, Holzer's mail art and street leaflets were included in the exhibition Social Strategies by Women Artists at London's Institute of Contemporary Arts, curated by Lucy Lippard.

In 1981, Holzer initiated the Living series, printed on aluminum and bronze plaques, the presentation format used by medical and government buildings.

The Living series addressed the necessities of daily life: eating, breathing, sleeping, and human relationships.

Her bland, short instructions were accompanied by paintings by American artist Peter Nadin, whose portraits of men and women attached to metal posts further articulated the emptiness of both life and message in the information age.

The medium of modern computer systems became an important component in Holzer's work in 1982, when the artist installed her first large electronic sign on the Spectacolor board in New York's Times Square.

Sponsored by the Public Art Fund program, the use of light-emitting diodes (LEDs) allowed Holzer to reach a larger audience.

The texts in her subsequent Survival series, compiled in 1983-85, speak to the great pain, delight, and ridiculousness of living in contemporary society.

She began working with stone in 1986; for her exhibition that year at the Barbara Gladstone Gallery in New York, Holzer introduced a total environment where viewers were confronted with the relentless visual buzz of a horizontal LED sign and stone benches leading up to an electronic altar.

Continuing this practice, her installation at the Guggenheim Museum in 1989 featured a 163-meter-long sign forming a continuous circle spiraling up a parapet wall.

Text-based light projections have been central to Holzer's practice since 1996.

From 2010, her LED signs started becoming more sculptural.

Holzer is no longer the author of her texts, and in the ensuing years, she returned to her roots by painting.

Holzer only uses capital letters in her work and frequently words or phrases are italicized.

She has stated before that this is because she wants to “show some sense of urgency and to speak a bit loudly."

In 2018 an excerpt from that work was printed on a card stitched onto the back of the dress Lorde wore to the Grammys; the excerpt read, "Rejoice! Our times are intolerable. Take courage, for the worst is a harbinger of the best. Only dire circumstance can precipitate the overthrow of oppressors. The old & corrupt must be laid to waste before the just can triumph. Contradiction will be heightened. The reckoning will be hastened by the staging of seed disturbances. The apocalypse will blossom."

Others at the Grammys wore white roses or all-white clothes to express solidarity with the Time's Up movement; Lorde wrote, "My version of a white rose — THE APOCALYPSE WILL BLOSSOM — an excerpt from the greatest of all time, jenny holzer."