Nancy Holt (1938-2014) and Robert Smithson (1938-1973) transformed the world of art and ideas. Holt/Smithson Foundation develops their distinctive creative legacies. Collaborating with artists, writers, thinkers, and institutions, Holt/Smithson Foundation realizes exhibitions, publishes books, initiates artist commissions, programs educational events, encourages research, and develops collections globally from its headquarters in New Mexico.
Nancy Holt (April 5, 1938 – February 8, 2014) was a member of the earth, land, and conceptual art movements. A pioneer of site-specific installation and the moving image, Holt recalibrated the limits of art. She expanded the places where art could be found and embraced the new media of her time. Across five decades she asked questions about how we might understand our place in the world, investigating perception, systems, and place.
For over fifty years, Robert Smithson's work and ideas have influenced artists and thinkers, building the ground from which contemporary art has grown. Born in New Jersey in 1938, Smithson' early interests in cartography, geology, prehistory, philosophy, science-fiction, and language spiral through his work. From his landmark earthworks to his “quasi-minimalist” sculptures, Nonsites, writings, proposals, collages, drawings, and radical rethinking of landscape, Smithson's ideas are profoundly urgent for our times.
Smithson at the Colosseum in Rome, in 1961. This photograph was taken during Smithson's first visit to Rome when George Lester offered him his first solo international exhibition at Galleria George Lester, where he explored quasi-religious subject matter.
An exhibition poster for Robert Smithson's 1962 solo exhibition at Richard Castellane Gallery, New York, NY. This was the first of Smithson's two solo exhibitions with Castellane Gallery in 1962.
24 x 18 in. (61 x46 cm.)
Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson marry in New York on June 8, 1963. This photograph of them was taken on Christmas, 1963.
Nancy Holt visits the American West for the first time with Smithson and Michael Heizer. Shoots film Mono Lake with Smithson and Heizer at California’s Mono Lake.
Photo: Michael Heizer
Robert Rauschenberg helps Smithson drag a tree out of the water and onto the beach on Captiva Island, Florida, in order to create Smithson's Upside Down Tree II.
Nancy Holt first presents her installation work Holes of Light in a solo exhibition at the LoGiudice Gallery.
While photographing Amarillo Ramp, Smithson dies in a small airplane accident, along with pilot Gale Ray Rogers and photographer Richard I. Curtin. Richard Serra, Nancy Holt, and Tony Shafrazi complete Amarillo Ramp one month after his passing.
Holt completes construction of her most discussed work, Sun Tunnels in Utah’s Great Basin Desert.
Working with Professor Lawrence Hanson and stonemason Al Poynter among others, Holt constructs Stone Enclosure: Rock Rings at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington.
Holt constructs and exhibits her first Electrical System works: Electrical System (For Thomas Edison) and Electrical System II: Bellman Circuit [pictured].
Nancy Holt moves to Galisteo, New Mexico.
Photo: Lucy Lippard, 1998
Holt completes a major earthwork in Nokia, Finland titled Up and Under.
Nancy Holt, Up and Under (1987-98)
Location: Pinsiö, Finland
Materials: sand, concrete, topsoil, grass, water
Overall surface area: 14 acres (5.7 hectares)
Mound: height ranges from 11 to 26 ft. (3.5 to 8 m), with a length of 630 ft. (192 m)
Tunnels: length 241 ft. (74 m), with a diameter of 10 ft. (3 m)
Orientation: using the North Star as true North, the tunnels are on north-south and east-west axes
© Holt/Smithson Foundation/licensed by VAGA at ARS, New York
From 2010 through 2012 the retrospective exhibition Nancy Holt: Sightlines (curated by Alena J. Williams) travels from the Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University to Badischer Kunstverein in Karlsruhe, Tufts University Art Gallery in Boston, the Graham Foundation in Chicago, Santa Fe Arts Institute, and the Utah Museum of Fine Arts in Salt Lake City.
Photograph: Stephan Baumann
We are happy to announce that throughout October we are publishing a seventh chapter of our Tuesday Text Series as part of our ongoing Scholarly Text Program, which invites thinkers to focus on a single artwork by Holt and/or Smithson.
Every Tuesday we will publish a text to our website that includes images selected by the author, a short bibliography, citation reference, and endnotes pointing to the author’s references.
The international conference Land Art Lives presented by Kunstmuseum M. and Land Art Flevoland will take place on October 3, 2024, in Lelystad in the province of Flevoland in central Netherlands.
Bluhm Family Terrace
From October 5, 2024 until April 20, 2025 a focused presentation of Nancy Holt’s Locators takes place at the Art Institute of Chicago, on the Bluhm Family Terrace.
The Fall issue of the Centre Pompidou journal Les cahiers du musée national d’art moderne publishes for the very first time Robert Smithson’s letters and writings from Rome, accompanied by previously unpublished early drawings.
The French language publication includes translations of letters Smithson wrote to Nancy Holt in 1959-1961 and letters Smithson sent to George Lester between 1960 and 1963. George Lester offered Smithson his first solo international exhibition at Galleria George Lester in Rome in 1961.
This July, SITE SANTA FE, in collaboration with artist Teresita Fernández and Holt/Smithson Foundation, presents the exhibition Teresita Fernández / Robert Smithson. Artist-led and conceptually driven, Teresita Fernández / Robert Smithson is a subjective, intergenerational conversation between two practices, pulling the past into the present. The exhibition critically considers entanglements between place, site, seeing, and deep time through the artists’ mutual engagement with material intelligence, geological agency, and cartographic fictions.
Nancy Holt: Power Systems at the Wexner Center for the Arts features the most extensive inquiry to date into Nancy Holt's studies of systems, focusing on her interactive site-responsive sculptural installations that expose the basic technological systems found in the built environment.
We are pleased to share Holt/Smithson Foundation has been awarded a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation to further our public-facing research into the art and ideas of Nancy Holt.
We are very happy to announce the details of the third edition our Annual Lecture Series, an initiative that invites artists, writers, and thinkers to raise questions and present research extending the creative legacies of the artists Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson. Over the course of a decade, we partner with a different institution each year to host lectures in ten distinct locations, each significant to Holt and Smithson.