American installation and conceptual artist. Her studies included general art courses at Duke University, Durham, NC (1968–70), and then painting, printmaking and drawing at the University of Chicago before completing her BFA at Ohio University, Athens (1972). In 1974 she took summer courses at the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, entering its MFA programme in 1975 and beginning her first work with language, installation and public art. Holzer moved to New York in 1977.
Read MoreHer first public works, Truisms (1977–9), appeared in the form of anonymous broadsheets pasted on buildings, walls and fences in and around Manhattan. Commercially printed in cool, bold italics, numerous one-line statements such as ‘Abuse of power comes as no surprise' and ‘There is a fine line between information and propaganda', were meant to be provocative and elicit public debate. Thereafter Holzer used language and the mechanics of late 20th-century communications as an assault on established notions of where art should be shown, with what intention and for whom. Her texts took the forms of posters, monumental and electronic signs, billboards, television and her signature medium, the LED (light emitting diode) sign. Other works appeared on T-shirts, tractor hats, stickers, metal plaques, park benches and sarcophagi. The LED signs have been placed in high-impact public spaces such as Times Square, New York, as well as in art galleries and museums.
Text courtesy Krakow Witkin Gallery.
Ocula Feature Sydney Contemporary Wrap By Jane O'Sullivan, Sydney A marble bench sat out of the front of the Pearl Lam Galleries stand at the Sydney Contemporary art fair last week. Inscribed with Chinese characters, and without a card stating the artist or artwork title, many visitors simply passed it by. Those who could read the inscription, and those who asked, found out it said: Don’t put too much...
Related Press Jenny Holzer Hits Her Mark in a Major, Largely Unnoticed Retrospective 29 August 2019, Hyperallergic BILBAO, Spain — One of the strangest things about this exhibition is how invisible it is beyond Bilbao. How does it happen that a major artist like Jenny Holzer gets a major retrospective — the largest survey of her work to date — at a major museum like the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao but no catalogue is produced, and there is...
Related Press Jenny Holzer’s piercing beacons of truth light up Guggenheim Museum Bilbao 29 March 2019, Wallpaper* Jenny Holzer was 26 when she arrived in New York. The freshman art student at the Whitney Museum had grown up in Gallipolis, Ohio, a sleepy town in America's Midwest, and had spent her early twenties jumping from place to place in search of her artistic identity. She started out as an abstract expressionist. Then she tried to capture the human...
Related Press San Francisco’s New Transit Center Features Public Art by Jenny Holzer, Julie Chang, and Ned Kahn 7 August 2018, Hyperallergic With their lobbying efforts beginning in 2006, the San Francisco Arts Commission convinced the intergovernmental agency developing the center to commit $4.75 million to on-site public art. Ranging from designed floors to interactive fountains, this funding supported work by James Carpenter, Julie Chang, Jenny Holzer, and Ned Kahn. These works are...
Related Press MASS MoCA: It’s a Site for All Eyes 15 June 2017, The New York Times MASS MoCA, the vast, multibuilding museum of contemporary art here, is a weird and wonderful place. For one, the dominance of brick walls, wood floors, big windows and frequent columns of its repurposed 19th-century factory buildings is the apotheosis of SoHo, whose small-industry loft spaces were taken over by commercial art galleries in the...
