Rockefeller Center
30 Rockefeller Plaza
October 10-12, free, 8:00 – 10:00 pm
creativetime.org
projects.jennyholzer.com
For more than forty years, Jenny Holzer has been producing text-based art, carving words into marble, projecting them on walls and buildings, running them digitally across sculptural signs, compiling them in lists, and even stitching them onto a dress Lorde wore to the Grammys. Her work has been seen on Singapore’s city hall, Silo No 5. in Montreal, the Potomac River, NYU’s Bobst Library, the New York Public Library, the Guggenheim, and Rockefeller Center. Her latest project takes her back to Rock Center with “Vigil,” a commission from the public arts organization Creative Time, which will be holding its tenth annual summit next month, asking the question “Can speaking truth to power unravel the age of disillusion we find ourselves in?”
From 8:00 to 10:00 on the evenings of October 10-12, the Ohio-born, New York-based Holzer will zero in on the rise of gun violence in the US, projecting excerpts from the 2017 book Bullets into Bells: Poets & Citizens Respond to Gun Violence, which combines poetry from established writers with responses from gun control activists, politicians, survivors of mass shootings, and family members of victims; stories from the award-winning activist website Moments that Survive, collected by Everytown for Gun Safety, which is dedicated to ending gun violence; and poems by teenagers who refuse to be silent. Holzer previously collaborated with Creative Time on “For New York City: Planes and Projections” and “For the City” in 2004-5, and her ongoing “It Is Guns” series, featuring such statements as “Scream Again,” “The President Backs Away,” and “Too Late Now” on trucks, has traveled to Chicago, Miami, Atlanta, Tallahassee, New York, and other American cities.
“There’s so much more to a book than just the reading,” Maurice Sendak is quoted as saying in D. W. Young’s wonderfully literate documentary The Booksellers, screening at the New York Film Festival on October 7 and 9. I have to admit to being a little biased, as I work in the children’s book industry in another part of my life, and I serve as the managing editor on Sendak’s old and newly discovered works. The film follows the exploits of a group of dedicated bibliophiles who treasure books as unique works of art, buying, selling, and collecting them not merely for the money but for the thrill of it. “The relationship of the individual to the book is very much like a love affair,” Americana collector Michael Zinman explains. 
