Jenny Holzer (born 1950 in Gallipolis, Ohio) earned a BFA in printmaking and painting from Ohio University in 1972, then an MFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1977 — formal training in exactly the two disciplines, language and print, that would define her career, though not yet in combination. That combination arrived in New York, where she enrolled in the Whitney Museum's Independent Study Program under tutor Ron Clark. His reading list — dense post-structuralist theory that Holzer found "wonderful yet daunting" — became the raw material for her breakthrough: she distilled its ideas into blunt, aphoristic one-liners and called them Truisms.

Working with the downtown artist collective Colab alongside Tom Otterness and Christy Rupp, Holzer printed the Truisms on broadsheets and wheat-pasted them anonymously across lower Manhattan between 1977 and 1979 — guerrilla distribution that mimicked official signage while undermining it. She was arrested during one pasting session; her own account of the incident, offered to the New York Times, has become one of her most quoted lines: "I was dripping with so much wheat paste they probably didn't want me on their back seat much longer." Inflammatory Essays (1979–82) followed the same method with longer, angrier texts on brightly coloured paper.

The move to LED signage in the early 1980s was not a stylistic shift but a logical extension: Holzer wanted her language displayed "where people look," and by the decade's end that meant electronic displays, stone benches, and eventually building-scale projections in cities from Florence to Rio de Janeiro. In 1990 she became the first woman to represent the United States solo at the Venice Biennale, winning the Golden Lion. In 2010 her practice returned to its printmaking roots with the Redaction Paintings — declassified US government documents from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, silkscreened onto oil-painted canvases, language as evidence rather than aphorism.

Her Truisms have outlived every context they were built to critique. In 2017, at the height of the #MeToo movement, a group of women revived one line from the original series — "Abuse of power comes as no surprise" — as the rallying name for their campaign, #NotSurprised: proof that a sentence pasted on a wall in 1977 could still organise a movement four decades later.

Truisms (1977–79), her foundational series, distilled dense critical theory into nearly 300 one-line aphorisms — arranged alphabetically, printed cheaply, and pasted anonymously across New York. Lines like "Protect me from what I want" and "Abuse of power comes as no surprise" achieved a strange permanence: stripped of authorship and context, they read as ancient proverbs and contemporary provocations simultaneously.

Inflammatory Essays (1979–82) extended the method into longer, more urgent texts — each exactly 100 words, printed on brightly coloured paper and wheat-pasted alongside the Truisms. Where the Truisms worked through brevity, the Essays worked through accumulation and tone, closer to political pamphlets than proverbs.

Her 1990 Venice Biennale installation, which filled the American Pavilion with scrolling LED text in multiple languages, won the Golden Lion and confirmed what a decade of wheat-pasted posters had already argued: that language, displayed with enough precision, could carry the same weight as sculpture or painting.

AKA (2019), a portfolio of five etchings, reproduces heavily redacted pages from the FBI's investigative file on George Orwell — compiled under J. Edgar Hoover, who suspected the author of communist sympathies despite novels built entirely around exposing totalitarian surveillance. The irony is the entire point: state censorship applied to the writer most famous for warning against it.

Holzer's relationship to print did not begin with her fame — it began with her training. Her BFA was in printmaking, and the Truisms and Inflammatory Essays that launched her career existed first as printed broadsheets before they existed as anything else. For Holzer, the print was never a secondary format translating some more authentic installation; the printed poster came first, and the LED signs, stone benches, and projections that followed were the extensions.

This gives her editions unusual coherence with the rest of her practice. A signed print of a Truism or an Inflammatory Essay carries the same declarative directness as the anonymous posters that first appeared on Manhattan walls in 1977 — the same typography, the same confrontation with the reader, now formalised into a collectible, numbered edition. Her prints span offset lithography, screenprint, etching, and more recent digital processes, frequently drawn from the same source texts and documents that appear across her LED works and public installations.

For collectors, Holzer's editions offer direct access to the medium she trained in before she became known for anything else. Works are held in the permanent collections of MoMA, Tate, and the Centre Pompidou.