Pioneering artist Jenny Holzer to receive Jesse Fifty. Rosenberger Medal

Courtesy Jenny Holzer

Courtesy Jenny Holzer

by UChicago Arts

The University of Chicago will award the 2019 Jesse L. Rosenberger Medal for Outstanding Achievement in the Creative and Performing Arts to artist Jenny Holzer, "whose unique text-based piece of work is ambitious, relevant, and influential."

Holzer volition receive her laurels at the University's Convocation ceremonies on June 15. She is the 54th recipient of the Rosenberger Medal, established in 1917 past Jesse 50. and Susan Colver Rosenberger. Contempo winners include musician and educator Steve Coleman and creative person Kerry James Marshall.

A pioneer in using public art equally social intervention, Holzer is perhaps all-time known for herTruisms—aphorisms such every bit "Abuse of power comes as no surprise" and "Protect me from what I want" featuring posters, billboards, LED signs, calorie-free projections, and more.

For 40 years, the New York-based Holzer has presented her works in public places and international exhibitions, including 7 World Merchandise Eye, the U.S. Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, the Guggenheim Museums in New York and Bilbao, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. She was the outset woman artist to showroom at Blenheim Palace.

Prior to receiving her BFA from Ohio University and her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, Holzer studied painting, printmaking, and drawing at the Academy of Chicago in the 1970s. She was nominated for the Rosenberger Medal past kinesthesia members in the Section of Visual Arts and the Section of Fine art History with the support of the Smart Museum of Fine art.

In 2012, Holzer collaborated with Zachary Cahill, manager of programs and fellowships at the Gray Eye for Arts and Inquiry, on the large-scale exhibitionWall Text, which was hosted throughout the spaces of UChicago'southward Logan Middle for the Arts. Below, Cahill, who curated the exhibition for the Section of Visual Arts's Open Practice Committee, reflects onWall Textand his appreciation for Holzer'southward piece of work.

The Abracadabra of Language in Plein Air: Jenny Holzer
 past Zachary Cahill, manager of programs and fellowships at the Grayness Centre for Arts and Inquiry

I similar Jenny Holzer.

What a woefully uncritical statement to submit, especially given the context for which I am writing hither. Context or non, to say you "like" something is a verbal tic for which art students the world-over are hammered away at until the word vanishes from their dictionary. Of form, the wisdom backside this pedagogical disciplining is not incorrect, mostly because it trains students to develop a more than sophisticated language to articulate their thinking procedure. It helps them avert toiling away in vague solipsisms and connect to their immediate and future peers. Nevertheless, I'll country information technology again and transgress this observed decorum.

I like Jenny Holzer, her work, and what information technology stands for in the world.

In 2012, I had the very good fortune to work with Holzer on an exhibition entitledWall Text at the Logan Heart, which I co-curated with Monika Szewczyk, the former curator of the Logan Center Gallery. Holzer generously, and without hesitation, agreed to loan 10 bronze plaques that were installed throughout the Logan Center on the occasion of its yard opening. Because the show was displayed throughout the building and not sited in the gallery-proper, information technology took on a special relationship with the educatee, the wider fine art viewing audience, and all of us who work in the building every day. This was true of all the works in the show, and Holzer's work in detail, because of the mode it evokes a double-take in the viewer. While this double-take effect is complicated to explain, I'd say it is a class of alchemy that is accomplished through placing poetry in public space. It is a blazon of verse that traffics in the rhetoric of official spoken communication, oft uttered by political slogans or advertising, but really functions similar a latter-mean solar day koan, whereby linguistic communication is used against itself and its own advent to create a kind of revelatory shock in the viewer.

A note left by Joy Miller of the Department of Visual Arts DoVA as a tribute to Holzer during the Wall Text exhibition at the Logan Center.

A note left by Joy Miller of the Section of Visual Arts DoVA as a tribute to Holzer during the Wall Text exhibition at the Logan Heart.

Withal, I am not sure these cursory thoughts on alchemy fully answer my claim that Holzer'due south work had a special relationship to the people who work at the Logan Center. Why they liked it. It is impossibly reductive to endeavor to speculate as to what living with Holzer's work day afterward solar day might take meant to my colleagues. I can only speak to why it was special to me.

Why I liked information technology.

Signs and official speech are something that happen to us. They are things that shape our twenty-four hours-to-day world, almost to the betoken that our daily life becomes rote, unthinking, and bland. Go hither. Go there. Think this. Think that.

Holzer'southward brusk-circuiting of official language in public space turns information technology back over to us. Through a near subliminal, oft fleeting, almost tiny oral communication act in public, we can recognize our ain bureau, creative intelligence, and the possibility of non being transformed into drones governed by some unseen power of the state or market place forces. That through her plein air abracadabra, we might come to realize that we possess the tools to re-imagine our everyday being, and exercise creative autonomy through solidarityin and by language that one time sought to command us.

This is why I suppose I feel fully comfortable in informing y'all that I like the piece of work of Jenny Holzer.

Rosenberger Medalists are invited to give a public lecture or workshop during the following academic yr. Stay tuned for more information about Holzer'southward engagement on campus. To larn more about the artist'due south work, please visitjennyholzer.com.