Jenny Holzer:
For Syracuse

Oct 2010 – Au 2012
Mon – Frid, dusk – 12am
UVP Syracuse Stage
820 East Genesee Street
Syracuse, NY — [retired venue]

About the Work


For Syracuse
2010
TRT:1:24:00
LED curtain video

Holzer created For Syracuse as a site-specific installation that streams across the façade of Syracuse Stage on an LED curtain. The installation features 272 aphorisms from her celebrated series, Truisms and Survival, that challenge viewer’s assumptions about the world we live in through the use of language as art. Whether questioning consumerist impulses, or lamenting the struggles of daily living Jenny Holzer always provokes a response. Her work crosses the boundary between poetry and visual art, and suggests both the limitations and power of technology and the information age.

© 2010-2011 Jenny Holzer, member Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY


About the Artist


For more than thirty years this influential American conceptual artist has been creating subversive works that blend in among advertisements in public spaces questioning and confronting our passive consumption of information. Since the early 1970’s, Holzer has been collecting and writing phrases and aphorisms found in literature, philosophy and contemporary culture. She calls these summaries her Truisms, and has printed them on bronze plaques, painted signs, stone benches, footstools, stickers, t-shirts, condoms, paintings, photographs, video, sound, light projection, and the Internet. In 1982, Holzer installed Truisms on one of Time Square’s gigantic LED billboards. In the 1980’s, for her Survival Series, Holzer adopted more personal and urgent messages about the realities of everyday living. Power, vulnerability, violence, tenderness, moral struggles and motherhood are courageously chronicled in this series which continuously prods the viewer to question the role of individuals in society.

Jenny Holzer was born in Gallipolis, OH in 1950. She received a BA from Ohio University in Athens; an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence; and honorary doctorates from the University of Ohio, the Rhode Island School of Design, and New School University, New York. She has received many awards, including the Golden Lion from the Venice Biennale; the Skowhegan Medal; and the Diploma of Chevalier from the French government. Major exhibitions include the Neue National Galerie, Berlin; Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; Dia Art Foundation, New York; and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Since 1996, Holzer has organized public light projections in cities worldwide. She was the first woman to represent the United States in the Venice Biennale. Jenny Holzer lives and works in Hoosick Falls, NY.

Visit the artist’s website: www.jennyholzer.com