Jenny Holzer
Her work focuses on 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.
[3] 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.
[12] 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.
[14] 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.
[16] In 1981, Holzer initiated the Living series, printed on aluminum and bronze plaques, the presentation format used by medical and government buildings.
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.
"[19] 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.
[23] Holzer uses the passages she had read while being a part of the Whitney Independent Study Program by simplifying them for public consumption and applying them to her phrases.
[27] In 1989, Holzer became the second female artist chosen to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale in Italy (Diane Arbus was the first, shown posthumously in 1972).
At the 44th Biennale in 1990, her LED signboards and marble benches occupied a solemn and austere exhibition space in the American Pavilion; she also designed posters, hats, and T-shirts to be sold in the streets of Venice.
The original installation is retained in its entirety in the collection of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, the organizing institution for the American Pavilion at the 1990 Biennale.
For example, a large LED work presents excerpts from the minutes of interrogations of American soldiers accused of committing human rights violations and war crimes in Abu Ghraib prison — making what was once secret public and exposing the "military-commercial-entertainment complex".
[31] Holzer's work often concerns violence, oppression, sexuality, feminism, power, war and death; the artist often utilizes the rhetoric of modern information systems to address the politics of discourse.
[32] Critic Samito Jalbuena has written that the artist's public use of language and ideas often creates shocking juxtapositions — commenting on sexual identity and gender relations ("Sex Differences Are Here To Stay") on an unassuming New York movie theater marquee, for example — and sometimes extends to flights of formal outrage (such as "Abuse Of Power Comes As No Surprise" in lights over Times Square).
[33] At the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in 2007, Holzer presented a series of mixed media silk-screen prints; each of the 15 same-size, medium-large canvases, stained purple or brown, bears an all-black, silk-screened reproduction of a PowerPoint diagram used in 2002 to brief President Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and others on the United States Central Command's plan for invading Iraq.
Holzer found these documents at the Web site of the independent, nongovernmental National Security Archive (nsarchive.org), which obtained them through the Freedom of Information Act, and has used them as source material for her work since 2004.
[13] The censor's marks are unmodified and the large sections of obscured text leave only sentence fragments or single words, echoes of the original content.
In 2015 she was in Jenny Holzer: Softer Targets at the Hauser & Wirth, Somerset in Bruton, UK which featured new work and other pieces from the past three decades.
Also in 2015 she had a solo exhibition at the Barbara Krakow Gallery in Boston, Massachusetts as well as War Paintings at Museo Correr in Venice, Italy.
In February 2017 she was also in the Palm Springs Popup exhibition at Ikon, Ltd., in Santa Monica alongside artists such as Richard Prince, Ellsworth Kelly, and Bruce Nauman.
The annual award – recognizing women for their leadership and innovation in the visual arts, dance, music, and literature – is a bronze plaque originally designed by the artist in 1994, featuring one of her Truisms: "It is in your self-interest to find a way to be very tender.
[75] In the early 1980s Holzer bought a farm in Hoosick, New York,[2][76] and began dividing her time between there and a loft on Eldridge Street in Manhattan.
[2] In a 2021 interview with Literary Hub, Holzer said that she "[has] a repressed spirituality", and stated, "I am not religious in any conventional sense, but I am all for applying appropriate feeling that might make for sanity and better behavior.
