Foundational Texts is a new monthly essay series for 2026 looking at some of the culture that shaped me and how it still resonates today. This is the first of 12 monthly installments.

I still remember standing there, watching words scroll by on a long LED display: ALL THINGS ARE DELICATELY INTERCONNECTED / ALWAYS STORE FOOD / ANGER OR HATE CAN BE A USEFUL MOTIVATING FORCE / ANY SURPLUS IS IMMORAL ... on and on, blue LEDs reflecting on the floor below them. I don't remember how old I was—14, I think, but I can't tell you for sure—but I remember that moment, still, decades later.

It was at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the old building on Ontario, the one Christo wrapped back in the 60s. I'd taken the train down with friends, definitely early high school and only starting to straddle the line between art kid and punk (with a blonde bowl cut and a penchant for thrifted suit vests, "weirdo" was probably the most accurate description for me back then). I remember the walk from the train to the museum, it was sunny and there was a coolness in the air. I remember the windows of the building, from inside looking out, and then all I remember is the piece.

Jenny Holzer's Truisms was a text-based art series that evolved over a decade, from the late 70s to the late 80s. Starting as stark, short, statements printed on broadsheets and wheatpasted on the walls of Manhattan, they evolved into elaborate art installations involving low-rez LED displays, marble benches, the entire spiral of the Guggenheim Museum, porn theater marquees in Times Square, brass plaques, T-shirts, and wall after wall after wall after wall. Over the course of the decade that she worked on Truisms, Jenny Holzer wrote hundreds of them.

For me, 14 and still trying to figure out how the walk in the world—motivated by anger and art in equal measure—seeing those LED displays scrolling through Truisms was a revelation. Art could be just words. Art could be just at home slapped on a POST NO BILLS wall as it could in a gallery. And art could be angry and blunt and even funny sometimes and it could be unapologetic for being all of those things at once. It was all entirely new for me, something I would grab onto and hold dear for decades. Truisms was, for me, absolutely a bedrock-level foundational text.

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