2022—Anne M. Wagner at the Whitney
In 2022 the Holt/Smithson Foundation Annual Lecture Series launches at the Whitney Museum of American Art , where our first speaker was the esteemed sculpture scholar Anne M. Wagner.
In a lecture titled, “Measures of Distance: Space and Sign in the Work of Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson and Holt” Professor Wagner explored the legacies of Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson’s earthworks in the American Southwest. She discussed how site and scale are crucial factors in the creation of Sun Tunnels and Spiral Jetty, but so are dump trucks, concrete, and mud.
Anne M. Wagner, Professor Emerita at the University of California, Berkeley, writes primarily on sculpture. Her essays explore topics as varied as Auguste Rodin’s reputation, Sarah Lucas’s ordinary objects, and the work of Charles Ray. With T.J. Clark, she has curated two major exhibitions, Lowry and the Painting of Modern Life (Tate Britain, 2013) and Pity and Terror: Picasso’s Path to Guernica (Museo Reina Sofía, 2017).
As with all our Annual Lectures, the location of our 2022 event has a special response to Holt and Smithson: from 1963 the artists lived together in the West Village in New York City, on Greenwich Street, just a few blocks from the Whitney’s current location.
