Many of Jenny Holzer’s works focus on the printed word. In 1990, to accompany Jenny Holzer: The Venice Installation—originally organized by Albright-Knox Chief Curator Michael Auping for the 1990 Venice Biennale—Holzer created four marble benches specifically for the Albright-Knox’s Sculpture Court. Holzer’s signature themes of “sex, death, and war” are reflected in the selections from her “Truisms,” “Inflammatory Essays,” “Survival,” and “Under a Rock” series that are engraved on Untitled (The Buffalo Installation), 1991.
Since her career began in the late 1970s, Sherrie Levine has continually appropriated works by male modern masters as a means to comment on issues of originality, authorship, and authenticity. The Albright-Knox’s Equivalents: After Stieglitz 1–18, 2006, consists of 18 digitized and pixilated photographic prints after American photographer Alfred Stieglitz’s series “Equivalents,” 1922–35, which featured analogue images of clouds that are understood to be abstract correlatives of Stieglitz’s own experiences and feelings.
Cindy Sherman is among the most well-known photographers working today, using herself as various fictive protagonists in allegorical and imaginative worlds, including in her iconic “Untitled Film Still” series. Several of Sherman’s 29 works in the Albright-Knox’s collection were recently on view in 2012’s Wish You Were Here: The Buffalo Avant-garde in the 1970s alongside the first re-creation of her A Play of Selves since its original 1976 installation at Hallwalls, which she helped found in 1974 with Charles Clough, Robert Longo, and others.