Hands on Your Breast Can Keep Your Heart Beating, from the series Survival

Jenny Holzer

1989

Indian red granite

Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston

Jenny Holzer’s (Born 1950 in Gallipolis, OH) medium is words and ideas, and she uses a variety of vehicles—from stickers, posters, and T-shirts to benches, bronze plaques, electronic displays, and the Internet—to disseminate her piercingly incisive phrases in public spaces. Holzer incorporates strategies from mass media and advertising to interrogate the effects of rhetoric. Rooted in conceptual art, semiotics, and feminism, her text-based works engage spectators in fundamental questions: Who is speaking? Where does this text come from? What does it mean? Answers, however, remain productively elusive. Her texts—whether directives, c