Jenny Holzer

Jenny Holzer is a visual artist and writer who uses language to explore ways that words can manipulate and influence us. Her short texts, most of which she writes herself, range from inflammatory to introspective essays. While she considers her work political and is deeply engaged with such issues as feminism, poverty, nuclear proliferation, and AIDS, Holzer’s texts express a range of viewpoints—or none at all. Always concerned with reaching a wide audience, she has placed her work in such public spaces as an electronic billboard in Times Square, the cable channel MTV, and the fronts of T-shirts and ball caps, but she has also worked in more traditional media, such as drawing, photography, and printmaking.

 Education, Truisms 

A native of Gallipolis, Ohio, Holzer originally hoped to be a painter. She studied at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, and earned an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. After moving to New York City in 1977, she began using language as her medium and produced her first major series, Truisms— short, often provocative sentences that she printed on handbills and posted anonymously on buildings and walls around Manhattan.

 Survival Series, Laments, Living 

In subsequent series, Holzer explores other methods of presentation. Survival Series (1983–1985), which warned about the dangers of everyday living, were blazoned on enormous electronic signboards in public spaces, while the more personal Laments (1989), which the artist identified as the thoughts of thirteen deceased adults and children, were engraved on a row of stone sarcophagi. Living (1981) was a group of short instructional texts first presented on bronze plaques to give them an institutional, authoritative look. In 1989, Holzer had 28 texts from Living engraved on white granite benches for the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, where they provide seating along one of the park’s pathways.

Venice Biennale, Abstract Paintings

In 1990, Holzer became the first woman to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale. Her installation of flashing LED signboards was awarded the Leone d’Oro for best pavilion. Since the mid-1990s, she has created dozens of outdoor light projections on buildings in cities ranging from Singapore to San Diego. Concurrently, the artist has returned to painting with silkscreened canvases based on declassified, redacted government documents concerning the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Holzer’s deeply felt and formally inventive work has established her as one of the leading artists of her generation.