Holt/Smithson Foundation Annual Lecture Series is a ten-year program that invites artists, writers, and thinkers to extend the creative legacies of Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson. Over  the next decade, the Foundation will partner with a new institution each year to host lectures in ten distinct locations, each significant to Holt and Smithson. 

The program launched in 2022 at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York with art historian Anne M. Wagner as the speaker. The second Annual Lecture took place at New Mexico Museum of Art, with Rebecca Solnit the keynote, a presentation by artists DesertArtLab, and a discussion with Lucy R. Lippard. The third was hosted by the Utah Museum of Fine Arts in Salt Lake City, Utah, with artist Renée Green as our speaker.

The speaker for our 2025 Holt/Smithson Foundation Annual Lecture will be the artist Katie Paterson. Presented in partnership with Land Art Lives, this fourth event in the series takes place at the Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo in The Netherlands in November 2025. 

In April 2026, we partner with the Archives of American Art in Washington D.C.—the home of the papers of Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson—and our guest speaker will be artist Matt Mullican. 

More details will be announced in the coming weeks.

a crowd at the annual lecture at the Whitney
Anne Wagner giving her lecture on Holt and Smithson at the Whitney Museum of American Art

2022—Anne M. Wagner at the Whitney

In 2022 the Holt/Smithson Foundation Annual Lecture Series launched at the Whitney Museum of American Art with a lecture by art historian Anne M. Wagner.
Rebecca Solnit at the 2023 Holt/Smithson Foundation Annual Lecture at the New Mexico Museum of Art

2023—Rebecca Solnit at the New Mexico Museum of Art

In April 2023, the New Mexico Museum of Art hosted the second Annual Lecture, inviting the writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit to think on Nancy Holt, along with an in-conversation with Lucy Lippard and a presentation by DesertArtLAB