Jenny Holzer

Jenny Holzer (born July 29, 1950) is an American neo-conceptual artist who lives and works in Hoosick, New York. She is known for putting words and ideas into public spaces through large-scale installations, billboards, building projections, and electronic displays. Holzer is part of a feminist wave of artists that came to prominence around 1980. During that time, she was an active member of the artist collective Colab and took part in its landmark exhibition, The Times Square Show.

Holzer was born in Gallipolis, Ohio, and grew up in Lancaster, Ohio, where her father ran a Ford dealership. She originally wanted to be an abstract painter. She studied general art at Duke University from 1968 to 1970, then painting, printmaking, and drawing at the University of Chicago, before earning a BFA from Ohio University in 1972. After summer courses at the Rhode Island School of Design in 1974, she entered its MFA program in 1975. She moved to Manhattan in 1976, joined the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program, and began working with language, installation, and public art. She received her MFA from RISD in 1977. From 1977 to around 1981, she was an active Colab member. To support herself early on, she worked as a typesetter for *Laundry News*, a trade newspaper for laundromats—a job that influenced her art.

Holzer’s work is neo-conceptual and mostly public, using words and text art. The public setting is essential to her practice. Her large-scale works have included billboards, building projections, and illuminated electronic displays. LED signs have become her most recognizable medium, but she has also used street posters, painted signs, stone benches, paintings, photographs, sound, video, projections, the Internet, T-shirts for Willi Smith, and a BMW race car. Text-based light projections have been central to her work since 1996. Starting in 2010, her LED signs became more sculptural. In later years, she stopped writing her own texts and returned to painting. Her LED works are often time-based, with texts that scroll, flash, or repeat over long periods. This movement and repetition connect her work to news tickers and advertising, highlighting the relationship between language, technology, and public space. Scholars note that the temporary nature of these electronic texts changes how viewers encounter and interpret the messages, as phrases unfold gradually rather than all at once.

Holzer uses only capital letters and often italicizes words or phrases. She has said this is to “show some sense of urgency and to speak a bit loudly.” She belongs to the feminist branch of artists who emerged around 1980, seeking new ways to embed narrative or commentary in visual objects. Other female contemporaries include Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman, Sarah Charlesworth, and Louise Lawler. Her work often addresses feminism and sexism, including sexual assault against women. She has said she gravitates toward such subjects because of family dysfunction she experienced and because “we don’t need work on joy.”

Holzer’s first public works, *Truisms* (1977–79), are among her best-known. They first appeared as anonymous broadsheets printed in black italic capital letters on white paper, which she wheat-pasted to buildings, walls, and fences in and around Manhattan. She developed *Truisms* by condensing complex theoretical texts into brief statements, inviting viewers to question common ideas through simple but provocative phrases. These one-liners distilled an erudite reading list from the Whitney Independent Study Program. She later printed *Truisms* on posters, T-shirts, and stickers, and carved them into stone benches. In late 1980, her 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 began the *Living* series, printed on aluminum and bronze plaques like those used in medical and government buildings. The series addressed daily necessities: 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 life and message in the information age.

*Inflammatory Essays* was a series of posters Holzer created from 1979 to 1982 and put up throughout New York. The statements were influenced by political figures including Emma Goldman, Vladimir Lenin, and Mao Tse-tung. In 2018, an excerpt from that work was printed on a card stitched onto the back of a dress worn by Lorde.

Among her most notable honors are the Leone d’Oro (1990), the World Economic Forum’s Crystal Award (1996), the rank of Officier des Arts et des Lettres (2016), the U.S. State Department’s International Medal of Arts (2017), and the Time 100 Award (2024). She has also received honorary doctorates from Williams College, the Rhode Island School of Design, the New School, and Smith College.