Jenny Holzer: YOU BE MY ALLY

YOU BE MY ALLY, 2020 Augmented reality app Text: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft, 1792; Citizen by Claudia Rankine, © 2014 by the author. Used with permission of Graywolf Press. Installation: University of Chicago, Illinois, USA, 2020 © 2020 Jenny Holzer, member Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY Photo: Christopher Dilts

The University of Chicago will debut a new public art commission by world-renowned artist and alumna Jenny Holzer (EX’74), YOU BE MY ALLY, premiering Oct. 5 on the UChicago campus and worldwide through a web-based augmented reality app. The text-based artwork is Holzer’s first augmented reality (AR) project using virtual projections in the United States and her first work created in collaboration with a university’s students and faculty.

Access the app at youbemyally.uchicago.edu

Learn more at jennyholzer.uchicago.edu

A pioneer of art as social intervention, Holzer received UChicago’s Rosenberger Medal in 2019 in recognition of her wide-reaching impact on public art. Running through Nov. 22, her artwork will project academic discourse into the public sphere, drawing on texts from UChicago’s Core curriculum—the distinctive multidisciplinary curriculum that serves as the common academic foundation for all College students.

YOU BE MY ALLY will feature 29 excerpts from historically significant readings from the Core curriculum, selected in collaboration with UChicago students and faculty, including works by distinguished writers W. E. B. Du Bois, Helen Keller, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Friedrich Nietzsche, Plato, Mary Shelley and Virginia Woolf. The title of the project itself is an excerpt from If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, a translation by classicist Anne Carson that is among the Core readings. Starting Oct. 5, viewers can access a free, web-based AR app to virtually project and animate these texts on the facades of architecturally significant UChicago buildings. In addition, app users will be able to project the title quote onto their surroundings anywhere in the world. On Oct. 30, additional quotations will become available to project anywhere.