Life Lines

Declassified state documents inform Jenny Holzer’s latest work, a series of watercolours, previewed on the following pages.

- Marina Cashdan

Jenny Holzer’s New York studio is in Dumbo, Brooklyn, a neighbourhood that has outgrown its gritty industrial past; warehouses and empty lots have been replaced by fancy high-rises, renovated lofts and coffee shops. The area is rife with advertising agencies, galleries, tech start-ups and tourists. But back in the late 1970s and 1980s, ‘the city was wilder’, recalls Holzer. It was the heyday of artistic collaboration and experimentation – an electric, DIY environment in which she found success by confronting and shining light (literally) on injustice and cruelty in the world around her.

Holzer is known for her light projections and LED panel works, where texts are launched across majestic landscapes like a Mexican valley and a seaside cliff face in Rio de Janeiro, or sent climbing the walls of iconic buildings, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Reichstag in Berlin and Winston Churchill’s ancestral home, Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire. Her words scream from marquees and billboards in major urban centres such as Times Square, or are quietly carved into benches and other stoneworks, in dozens more locations. The texts are crafted or chosen carefully and paired with a typeface, hue and/or location that imbue them with layers of complexity beyond the words alone. But before she employed language, Holzer started as a painter. She received her undergraduate degree from Ohio University (after stints at Duke and the University of Chicago), and then pursued her graduate degree at the Rhode Island School of Design, where she focused on painting.