Wednesdays-Mondays 10am—5pm Closed Tuesdays. Interested in adding your own sentence to the Truisms posters in this exhibition? A good truism is short and to the point. Your truism should read as if it has been in use for a hundred years. Email your one-sentence all-capitalized submission to truisms massmoca.
Holzer began installing her Truisms posters — alphabetical lists of concise statements on subjects from money and class to sex and love — throughout downtown New York in Her medium, whether formulated as a T-shirt, a plaque, or an LED sign, is writing, and the public dimension is integral to the delivery of her work. Starting in the s with the New York City posters and continuing through her recent light projections on landscape and architecture, her practice has rivaled ignorance and violence with humor, kindness, and courage.
She lives and works in New York. Each sentence distills difficult and contentious ideas into a seemingly straightforward statement of fact. Privileging no single viewpoint, Truisms examine beliefs, mores, and truths. Arranged in alphabetical order, they were first shown on anonymous street posters pasted throughout downtown Manhattan, and they have since appeared on T-shirts, hats, electronic signs, stone floors, and benches. As with any manifesto, the voice in each text urges and espouses a strong and particular viewpoint.
By remaining anonymous as the author, Holzer allows the reader to assess ideologies separated from personality.
These texts invite us to consider the urgent necessity of social change, the possibility for manipulation of the public, and the conditions that attend revolution.
