28 Facts About Jenny Holzer

Jenny Holzer's 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.

Jenny Holzer was born on July 29,1950 in Gallipolis, Ohio.

Jenny Holzer moved to Manhattan in 1976, joined the Whitney Museum's Independent Study Program, and began her first work with language, installation and public art.

Jenny Holzer received her MFA from RISD in 1977 and was an active member of Colab from 1977 to around 1981, participating in the famous Times Square Show and other Colab projects.

Jenny Holzer is no longer the author of her texts, and in the ensuing years, she returned to her roots by painting.

Jenny Holzer only uses capital letters in her work and frequently words or phrases are italicized.

Jenny Holzer has stated before that this is because she wants to "show some sense of urgency and to speak a bit loudly".

Jenny 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.

Jenny Holzer printed other Truisms on posters, T-shirts and stickers, and carved them into stone benches.

In 1981, Jenny Holzer initiated the Living series, printed on aluminum and bronze plaques, the presentation format used by medical and government buildings.

Inflammatory Essays was a work consisting of posters Jenny Holzer created from 1979 to 1982 and put up throughout New York.

Jenny Holzer began working with stone in 1986; for her exhibition that year at the Barbara Gladstone Gallery in New York, Holzer introduced a total environment where viewers were confronted with the relentless visual buzz of a horizontal LED sign and stone benches leading up to an electronic altar.

In 1989, Jenny Holzer released the Laments series to the Dia Art Foundation in New York; this installation consisted of columns of colored lights and carved marble and granite tops that made up the laments.

Jenny 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.

In Laments Jenny Holzer gave a voice to 13 different dead individuals, to say everything they might not have gotten the opportunity to while alive.

In 1989, Jenny Holzer became the second female artist chosen to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale in Italy.

Jenny Holzer came out with her Lustmord series, taking the title from the German word meaning "sex murder".

At the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in 2007, Jenny 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.

Jenny Holzer has participated in Documenta 8, Kassel, as well as in group exhibitions in major institutions such as the Stedelijk Museum, Den Bosch, The Netherlands, the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Jenny Holzer had several solo exhibitions in the past several years.

Jenny Holzer and Christian Lemmerz: Lust was an exhibition on view from February 2017 to May 2017 at the Randers Kunstmuseum in Randers, Denmark.

Jenny Holzer was featured in the exhibition Woman Now at the Workhouse Arts Center in Lorton, Virginia, on view from January 2017 to April 2017; her work was shown alongside Andy Warhol and Joseph Beuys, among others, in the exhibition Creature at The Broad in Los Angeles California from November 2016 to March 2017.

Also, in the summer of 2016, Jenny Holzer was included in THE EIGHTIES: A Decade of Extremes exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp in Belgium which explored the New York art scene in the eighties.

Jenny Holzer has the entire second floor of Guggenheim Museum Bilbao from March 22 to September 9,2019 for "Zera deskribaezina".

In 2010, Jenny Holzer received the Distinguished Women in the Arts Award from the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

Jenny Holzer holds honorary degrees from Williams College, the Rhode Island School of Design, The New School, and Smith College.

Jenny Holzer sold the loft in the late 1990s but still maintains a studio in Brooklyn.

Ahead of the 2024 United States presidential election, Jenny Holzer was one of 165 leading contemporary artists who contributed pieces to Artists for Kamala, an online sale with all proceeds raised going directly to Kamala Harris' campaign.