2024—Renée Green at Utah Museum of Fine Arts
Renée Green, Imagining Contact: Then, When, Now, Here
The Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Friday, September 27, 2024
The Holt/Smithson Foundation Annual Lecture Series is a ten-year program inviting 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, the Foundation partners with a different institution each year to host lectures in ten distinct locations, each significant to Holt and Smithson.
Artist Renée Green was our invited speaker for the third Holt/Smithson Foundation Annual Lecture, which took place at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City—the closest museum to Holt’s Sun Tunnels (1973-1976) and Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970). Green presented a talk titled Imagining Contact: Then, When, Now, Here, and was in conversation with our Executive Director, Lisa Le Feuvre, reflecting on her continuing interest on the work of Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson.
Green’s expansive installation Partially Buried in Three Parts (1996-1997) began with a reflection on the artist Robert Smithson’s Partially Buried Woodshed (1970), a work primarily known through photographs, drawings, and rumors. Consisting of Partially Buried (1996), Übertragen/Transfer (1997), and Partially Buried Continued (1997), Green’s multimedia installation grew out of a consideration of the year 1970 and the associations became denser in the process of working, becoming a formal and conceptual archaeological endeavor reflecting on the vagaries of memory and historical recall.
In 2024, Green found herself thinking about a variety of projects which intersect with the work and thoughts of Smithson, as well as those of Nancy Holt. At present, she is developing new work for the Foundation’s The Island Project: Point of Departure, for Western Washington University Sculpture Collection, which hosts Holt’s Stone Enclosure: Rock Rings (1977-1978), and for Dia Art Foundation, which is the steward of Sun Tunnels and Spiral Jetty.
In considering Holt and Smithson in the present, Green reflected: “As I read, I continue to wonder about that distant time, then, when things happened differently. The traces I find in books stimulate curiosity to further wonder about the places referenced in images, a wish to see what is here, or there, now; I am curious too about what cannot be seen in the images. Questions of both space and place arise. Questions of time also arise. Questions of travel, questions of the environment, built and unbuilt, emerge too as I think and feel, now, here. On earth.”
About Renée Green
Renée Green (born 1959, Cleveland, OH) is an artist, writer, and filmmaker. Her exhibitions, videos, and films have been seen throughout the world in art museums and institutions, biennales, and film festivals. A selection of her recent books includes Inevitable Distances (2022, Hatje Cantz); Pacing (2020, Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts & Free Agent Media, Cambridge, MA), and Other Planes of There: Selected Writings (2014, Duke University Press, Durham). She is the editor of Negotiations in the Contact Zone (2003, Assírio & Alvim, Lisbon), and a Professor at the Art, Culture and Technology program at MIT, School of Architecture & Planning.
About Utah Museum of Fine Arts
Officially incorporated and opened in 1951, the Utah Museum of Fine Arts (UMFA) at the University of Utah is a destination for global visual arts. From ancient objects to the latest contemporary works, the UMFA galleries showcase the breadth and depth of human history and creativity. The Museum’s collection of nearly 21,000 original works of art is the most dynamic in the region. As the fine arts museum for both the state and the University, the UMFA is a vibrant hub for cultural exchange among campus and community audiences.
