Jenny Holzer has created a text-based piece for the New York City Aids memorial, now open to the public at St. Vincent's Triangle park on West 12th Street and 7th Avenue. The piece excerpts Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself," contextualized here in commemoration of the men, women and children who lost their lives to AIDS. Urban planners Christopher Tepper and Paul Kelterborn initiated the campaign for the monument in 2011 and the final installation incorporates an 18-foot high canopy structure designed by the architecture studio ai.
In conversation with The Art Newspaper in 2015, Holzer said, "Excerpts from 'Song of Myself' by Walt Whitman [first published in 1855] are the text on the granite paving stones. The Whitman poem is a beauty from a man in full and glad possession of his body."
