In a Moving Public Art Project, Jenny Holzer Will Project Firsthand Accounts of Gun Violence Onto Rockefeller Center

For three nights next month, New
York’s Rockefeller Center will be aglow with the testimonies of
those affected by gun violence in the US.

Pairing up with public art
non-profit Creative Time for the third time, artist Jenny Holzer
will project onto the building’s facade accounts from mass shooting
victims. The project, titled Vigil, will be projected nightly onto the building
at 8 p.m. on October 10, 11, and 12.

Whereas most Creative Time
efforts come together over the course of many months or even years,
Holzer’s project has been pulled together in less than 8
weeks.

The work was crafted in response
to back-to-back mass shootings in August—in El Paso, Texas, where a
gunman killed 22 people, and Dayton, Ohio, in which nine people
were killed. (Since then, two more massacres in Elkmont, Alabama,
and Odessa, Texas, have taken 12 more lives.)

“It’s massively problematic that
we’ve started seeing this as commonplace,” Justine Ludwig, Creative
Time’s executive director, tells artnet News. “This is not normal
and we cannot accept it as such.” 

The artist’s texts are culled
from first-hand accounts by shooting survivors; interviews with
family members of deceased victims; a book of poetry written in
response to the growing epidemic, “Bullets into
Bells”; and materials
produced by the advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety.

For Ludwig, Holzer was the ideal
figure to tackle the issue of gun violence. 

“We want to move away from
numbers and statistics that can be numbing and bring forth the
voices of those most affected by this issue,” the director says,
explaining Holzer’s gift for distilling complex issues into poetry.
“It’s about presenting a very personal perspective about what this
massive issue in the US has wrought.”

The artist previously addressed
the issue in 2018, when she deployed a series of black trucks
emblazoned with bold texts around cities in the US.

She also worked with Creative
Time in 2004–05 to mount two projects. In one, she projected
excerpts from her signature Truisms series on landmarks around New York,
including Rockefeller
Center; in the second, titled For New York City: Planes and
Projections, she
enlisted pilots to fly around the Hudson River with
banners.

Holzer was also included in the
“42nd Street Art Project,” Creative Time’s landmark 1993 exhibition that
turned the stores, billboards, and sidewalks of the titular street
into a 24/7 public art gallery.

The post In a Moving Public Art Project, Jenny Holzer Will
Project Firsthand Accounts of Gun Violence Onto Rockefeller
Center appeared first on artnet News.