Jenny Holzer

Jenny Holzer (born July 29, 1950, Gallipolis, Ohio, U.S.) is an American installation and conceptual artist who utilizes original and borrowed text to create works that explore and question contemporary issues. She is best known for her flashing electronic LED sign sculptures that display carefully composed yet fleeting phrases that act as verbal meditations on power, trauma, knowledge, and hope.

Education and early work

Holzer initially explored abstract painting during her studies at Ohio University and the Rhode Island School of Design before moving to New York City in 1977. That same year she was accepted into the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program, where her interest in social and cultural theory culminated in the Truisms series (1977–79). The works, composed of seemingly familiar slogans such as “Abuse of power comes as no surprise,” were originally presented by Holzer as phrases on anonymous posters and were later presented on T-shirts, billboards, and electronic signs. These texts, fraught with cynicism and political implications, were followed by the more structured and complex Inflammatory Essays (1979–82), Living series (1981–82), and Survival series (1983–85), which were seamlessly integrated into various urban landscapes as plaques and signs.

Work from the mid-1980s and early ’90s

In the mid-1980s, a period during which she produced a series of introspective and mournful works including Under a Rock (1986) and Laments (1989), Holzer began inscribing her texts on stone benches, sarcophagi, and floor tiles. These accompanied her LED signs in numerous exhibitions and were installed independently as site-specific works. Holzer’s installation for the United States Pavilion at the 1990 Venice Biennale, which won the Golden Lion Award, exemplified the tension inherent in her chosen words through the juxtaposition of texts set in austere marble tiles and benches and those aggressively flashing across commercial LED signs.

Work from the late 1990s and 2000s

From 1996 Holzer expanded her installations to include large-scale outdoor light projections, choosing public locations that demanded viewer attention. Beginning in 2001, she started incorporating borrowed texts in her work, including poetry, literature, and bureaucratic documents. In 2005 Holzer turned to reportage with the Redaction paintings, a series of silk-screened canvases of enlarged declassified and redacted government documents pertaining to wars past and present. Similar to her original texts, these paintings underscore the impossibility of fixed meaning and the multiple viewpoints always present in her work. With these projects and others, Holzer continued to utilize words to question the relationship between the private and the public. In 2008 a 15-year survey of her work, “Jenny Holzer: Protect Protect,” opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and it traveled to the Whitney Museum of American Art the following year.

Later work

Holzer’s later projects included a monumental installation for the Louvre Abu Dhabi (2017) featuring excerpts from a Mesopotamian creation myth, Michel de Montaigne’s Essays, and Ibn Khaldun Muqaddimah (“Introduction”) inscribed on marble panels. It Is Guns (2018–19) responded to mass shootings in the United States, while Expose (2020) commented on the government’s mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic. Each piece projected such texts as “duck and cover” and “unnecessary death can’t be policy” onto LED trucks that drove unannounced through cities including New York, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Dallas, and Los Angeles. The works recalled her 1984 series Sign on a Truck, wherein she projected a range of media, including her Truisms, onto a screen-mounted truck, which she had parked in New York City. In 2024 Holzer also revisited her 1989 installation at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, in which scrolling text from Truisms and Inflammatory Essays was placed along the ramps of the building’s rotunda.