After several attempts to stage our Benefit Dinner in honor of Jenny Holzer, we regret that we’ve had to forgo our in-person celebration at the beautiful New York Marble Cemetery, due to September rain and June’s wildfire smoke!

In place of the event, we are pleased to recognize Holzer for her enduring work with artists’ books and editions — and celebrate her exemplary involvement in Printed Matter from our earliest days. Holzer’s contributions to the cultural landscape are have been tremendously rich, and we have been privileged to carry her publications and multiples over the decades, as well as work with her to present exhibitions and in-store events. We extend our admiration to her for her singular vision, as well as gratitude for her advocacy and her generous support of Printed Matter’s work!

As Director Max Schumann wrote of her practice in his planned remarks: “Her charged text-based works question broken systems and abuses of power—while also celebrating possibility and hope—and attest to the force of language itself.” We are very happy to share abridged remarks from Max, alongside those from writer Gary Indiana and poet Eileen Myles, who were scheduled to toast Holzer at the event, found below!

Lastly, we are excited to make available a new series of foil-stamped wooden postcards produced with Holzer for the Benefit event, from her iconic Truisms series. Holzer has been kind enough to sign a limited number of cards to help offset costs of the canceled event, and to strengthen Printed Matter’s programs and services.

We remain so grateful to our co-chairs, benefit committee, and all those who supported this fundraiser. We thank you for your support!

From Printed Matter's Executive Director, Max Schumann

Since Printed Matter’s founding in 1976 our mission has been to foster the distribution of artists’ books and related publications to the broadest audience possible, supported by a full range of programs devoted to the medium and this ethos of accessibility. Holzer’s artwork has likewise revolved around the spirit of public access—her public art practice began in the late 70s with her poster projects of Truisms and Inflammatory Essays displayed on the streets of New York, and evolved into epically scaled LED textworks and projections in vast public spaces around the world. Her charged text-based works question broken systems and abuses of power—while also celebrating possibility and hope—and attest to the force of language itself. Holzer’s embrace of the everyday, through her textworks and their circulation through public spaces by way of objects, projections and other forms of transmission, provides both a utilitarian model for the social engagement of art, as well as an aspirational vision of an egalitarian art/life practice.

Holzer has also had a career-long involvement with Printed Matter: her early artists’ books, Diagrams and Black Book, quickly found their way into Printed Matter’s inventory, and one of her earliest solo exhibitions was staged at the Lispenard Street storefront in 1979 as part of Lucy Lippard’s window installation series. Ever since Printed Matter has carried her artists’ books and editions. In 2002 Printed Matter presented the exhibition PROTECT ME FROM WHAT I WANT: The Multiples and Editioned Works of Jenny Holzer which featured some 200 titles of Holzer’s textworks emblazoned on ordinary objects and media, such as posters, postcards, plaques, stickers, T-shirts, baseball caps, pencils, golf balls, condoms, rubber stamps, paper cups, rings, bracelets, paperweights and, of course, books. In all of this, Holzer has been a great contributor and closely involved, while also generously donating many of the available works to benefit the organization.

And so, a tremendous thanks to Jenny for her singular participation in this shared field, for her advocacy, and for her generous support of Printed Matter’s essential work.

On behalf of Printed Matter and the Board of Directors, we are so grateful to our Benefit Co-Chairs and Committee, and to all of our friends, collaborators, and supporters whose generous participation allows us to continue and further our work in the service of artists’ books and publications, and the artists and publishers who make them.

A curator I know wrote the following: “If the utopian believes he can make the world a better place, the fatalist accepts that he cannot. The utopian strain in Holzer’s art is rooted in her faith in the power of art to transcend and transform reality, while her observation of human frailty in a fallen world confirms her fatalistic streak.”

That is nicely put. I think many people believe, when they’re young, that what they do in life will change the world, but I suspect that most if not all of those people are boys, who from an early age consume stories about Napoleon and other men possessed of the will to power who have, in fact, changed the world in various ways, and I say this because most girls grow up to recognize these world-altering heroes as psychopaths…

I might argue a bit with the idea of utopia, because it too seems like something, historically at least, invented by a patriarchal mentality, but we could also take it as intended here, that is, as a wish that the condition of reality might be made better, through human effort... Jenny Holzer’s art emits this wish, certainly, and her works themselves embody it in the intense beauty of their forms, but they give equal voice to the grim reality that human beings behaving badly have forced all of us into a very dangerous world. From the beginning, her art has aimed directly at a layer of consciousness below the topsoil, so to speak—in the least autobiographical way possible—though everything we do is, in some sense, autobiographical—its multiplicity of voices left you in the dark about who was addressing you; very often it seemed that you were reading the unuttered thoughts of people around you, or, more disturbingly, transcripts of the incessant conversations you had with yourself—a rumination, very often, full of incompatible feelings, marking out your space in the world and indicating the ways you dealt with others, or they dealt with you, expressing the possible joys and probable torments of being alive in a body, in the world, as well as certain attractive moral sentiments, along with various styles of interpersonal aggression and mistrust that contradicted those sentiments.

A lot of the problems Jenny Holzer’s art has addressed head-on in recent years, in a profusion of works of sculptural and architectural ingenuity and compelling beauty, installations, projections, paintings and other forms that seduce us into close proximity with the horrors of our times—the planetary climate crisis, the ongoing insanity of gun violence, military and governmental criminality, the obscenity of torture and the grotesque victimization of the powerless—can easily induce a fatalistic view. Works of art can’t change the world, but they can, as hers do, introduce notes of sanity into the realm of public awareness, one noggin at a time, often many at the same time. Her work is like a high-wire act, balancing a risky tension between the blunt horror of it all and an equivocal belief in the possibility of improving things, and modest prescriptions for how this might be accomplished; in her work, the things that go wrong within human beings and the much larger things going wrong in the world have an exact symbiotic bond. She makes plenty of space for the more generative, empathetic, and ethical actions and impulses that are always available to us but often appear entirely out of reach.

When my girlfriend cleaned Rene Ricard’s incredibly piggy apartment in either the late seventies or the early eighties as well as getting cash she came away w a pale pink teeshirt from which the sleeves had already been cut off. Abuse of power should be no surprise and so on. It was Jenny’s admonitions. It’s art Rene informed when he handed it away and we fought for possession of that teeshirt for as long as it lived in our laundry till a bag of it was stolen or one day slipped away. The Poetry Project was doing a benefit a few years later and they were matching poets & visual artists and they gave me Jenny but I thought we don’t need each other & apparently she agreed since nothing ever happened & she sent me a postcard apologizing & saying she had been busy which was nice & I tucked the postcard away it’s in my archive somewhere. For a while in the early nineties or the late eighties I imagined a series of historical paintings most of which I have forgotten but they were visions as I think of it and one was the death of Cookie Mueller with all her friends standing around and the other is Jenny Holzer at the Guggenheim certainly it was some kind of breathtaking Hudson River School feeling to be standing there and all the tiny people painted in their spots & the LED of Jenny’s thought wrapping around - going up to the top of the building. This is us today I thought. What is Jenny Holzer. I happened to be in San Diego when a museum it was in La Jolla actually cast her words in water I think I learned the lines were the work of the poet Henry Cole and they rippled & vanished perfect treatment I thought for poetry to be eaten by the sea. So Jenny’s not water or words or stone I like that she’s beyond materiality kind of a top & I lift a glass to her here.

Philip Aarons & Shelley Fox Aarons, Co-Chairs
Elyse & Lawrence Benenson, Co-Chairs
Agnes Gund, Co-Chair
Charline von Heyl & Christopher Wool, Co-Chairs*

Tauba Auerbach, AA Bronson & Mark Jan Krayenhoff van de Leur, Modica Carr Art Advisory, Mickey Cartin, Paula Cooper Gallery, David Deitcher, Jane Hait & Justin Beal, Susan Harris, Hauser & Wirth, Tom Healy & Fred P. Hochberg, Skuta Helgason & Sharon Gallagher, Miyoung Lee & Neil Simpkins, Mary Lum, Sprüth Magers, Carolina Nitsch, P.P.O.W., Cay Sophie Rabinowitz & Christian Rattemeyer, Beth Rudin DeWoody, Thea Westreich Wagner & Ethan Wagner, Robin Wright & Ian Reeves

*In honor of departing Director Max Schumann