NARRATOR:  

Curator Gary Garrels.  

GARY GARRELS: 

Jenny Holzer was part of young generation of artists who settled in NY in late 1970s who were generally living downtown, Lower East Side, East Village, very interested in art being an expression of their urban environment, and part of a social environment. Artists were dealing with work very specifically about social content.  

Holzer began writing very simple statements about values, about relationships between classes, between sexes. And she developed these texts and then would find different ways for those to be communicated. So originally, she did these street posters, broadsheets put up in the middle night, guerilla that would just disappear. Then she became fascinated by this new technology that was just developing, LEDs. 

NARRATOR: 

In 1982, Holzer programmed an electronic marquee in Times Square to broadcast her truisms as part of a public art project. Holzer said in a 1990 interview that she liked having her words on signs normally used for advertising because, quote, “It was like having the voice of authority say something different from what it would normally say.”