Handwritten menu and offset lithograph on textured card, signed and dated, 1988, verso, by Jenny Holzer in pencil.

This work comes from the personal collection of Keith Haring.

Keith Haring and Jenny Holzer connected in the downtown New York arts scene in the early 1980’s. Like Keith and many of the other street artists, Jenny focused on delivering her art, specifically her words, to public spaces throughout the city. Keith was inspired by what Jenny was doing and began incorporating her ideas into his own projects.

"I used the idea [from Burroughs and Gysin] when I cut up headlines from the New York Post and put them back together and then put them up on the streets as handbills. That’s how I started work on the street. There was a group of people using the streets for art then, like Jenny Holzer, who was putting out these handbills with things she was calling truisms, these absurd comments. I was altering advertisements and making these fake Post headlines that were completely absurd: REAGAN SLAIN BY HERO COP or POPE KILLED FOR FREED HOSTAGE. I’d post them all over the place."

(Keith Haring in “Just Say Know”, Rolling Stone, 10 August 1989)

Haring and Holzer both had exhibitions as part of the "Investigations" series at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in Philadelphia in 1983. In 1986, they collaborated on an installation work created for The Wiener Festwochen, also known as the Vienna Festival, in Vienna.