2026—Matt Mullican at the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution

Our guest speaker for 2026 Holt/Smithson Foundation Annual Lecture was artist Matt Mullican, and our partner for the fifth event in the series was the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art.

Mullican is an American conceptual artist whose work investigates perception, language, and the systems through which reality is understood. Educated at the California Institute of the Arts, he emerged in the 1970s with a practice that integrates drawing, installation, performance, and symbolic systems into immersive maps of meaning.

In his talk, Mirrors and Melted Telephones, Mullican reflected on Holt’s systems of vision and Smithson’s attention to matter and entropy through the lens of his own practice. He showed over 100 images from books in his collection, and following the lecture was in conversation with our Executive Director, Lisa Le Feuvre.

Our Annual Lecture Series is a ten-year program launched in 2022 that invites artists, writers, and thinkers to extend the creative legacies of Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson. Over the course of a decade, we will partner with a new institution each year to host lectures in ten distinct locations significant to Holt and Smithson. The Archives holds the papers of Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson, as well as those of Matt Mullican. It is the world’s preeminent and most widely used research center dedicated to collecting, preserving, and providing access to primary sources documenting the history of the visual arts in the United States.