Kate Just, A Sign of the Times: A knitted translation of Jenny Holzer, Abuse of Power Comes as No Surprise and Moral Injury, 2021, Mass MOCA, North Adams, MA, USA (2026)
Hand knitted acrylic yarn, timber, canvas
56 x 81 x 2.5cm

American artist Jenny Holzer’s billboards, ‘Abuse of Power Comes As No Surprise’ and ‘Moral Injury’, were installed in public in North Adams in association with Mass Moca in 2021. The texts are taken from Holzer’s ongoing series of maxims entitled Truisms.

Truisms is a group of declarative sentences Holzer first put up anonymously on posters all over New York City: ‘Labor is a life-destroying activity’, ‘Lack of charisma can be fatal’ and ‘Private property created crime’.

Over her career, Holzer has emblazoned her truisms across buildings, on t-shirts, caps, billboards and light installations. Through her work, Holzer intervenes in public space, draws attention to violence, ignorance, and institutional and systemic bias, and uses humour and kindness to prompt closer reflection of our own relationship to these.

Mass Moca is a museum I drive to every time I go to visit my family in Massachusetts, so the site is familiar to me. North Adams is a small town of 12,000 but hosts the largest contemporary art museum in the United States. Holzer’s work gives pause to consider both abuse of power and the forms of spiritual, psychological or ethical distress experienced after “people perpetrate, fail to prevent, or witness events that contradict deeply held moral beliefs and expectations.”