Nancy Holt, Art in the Public Eye: The Making of Dark Star Park (1988)
Video, color, sound
Duration: 32 minutes, 24 seconds

© Holt/Smithson Foundation / Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York
Distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix, New York and Video Data Bank, Chicago

aerial view of Dark Star Park, two large spheres and a circular pool

Nancy Holt, Art in the Public Eye: The Making of Dark Star Park (1988)
Video, color, sound
Duration: 32 minutes, 24 seconds

© Holt/Smithson Foundation / Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York
Distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix, New York and Video Data Bank, Chicago

Nancy Holt, Art in the Public Eye: The Making of Dark Star Park (1988)
Video, color, sound
Duration: 32 minutes, 24 seconds

© Holt/Smithson Foundation / Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York
Distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix, New York and Video Data Bank, Chicago

a view through a tunnel framing a sphere

Nancy Holt, Art in the Public Eye: The Making of Dark Star Park (1988)
Video, color, sound
Duration: 32 minutes, 24 seconds

© Holt/Smithson Foundation / Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York
Distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix, New York and Video Data Bank, Chicago

Nancy Holt, Art in the Public Eye: The Making of Dark Star Park (1988)
Video, color, sound
Duration: 32 minutes, 24 seconds

© Holt/Smithson Foundation / Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York
Distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix, New York and Video Data Bank, Chicago

one person filming another person holding up their arm showing their watch

Nancy Holt, Art in the Public Eye: The Making of Dark Star Park (1988)
Video, color, sound
Duration: 32 minutes, 24 seconds

© Holt/Smithson Foundation / Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York
Distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix, New York and Video Data Bank, Chicago

Nancy Holt, Art in the Public Eye: The Making of Dark Star Park (1988)
Video, color, sound
Duration: 32 minutes, 24 seconds

© Holt/Smithson Foundation / Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York
Distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix, New York and Video Data Bank, Chicago

people walking through a large circular tunnel in a hillside

Nancy Holt, Art in the Public Eye: The Making of Dark Star Park (1988)
Video, color, sound
Duration: 32 minutes, 24 seconds

© Holt/Smithson Foundation / Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York
Distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix, New York and Video Data Bank, Chicago

Nancy Holt, Art in the Public Eye: The Making of Dark Star Park (1988)
Video, color, sound
Duration: 32 minutes, 24 seconds

© Holt/Smithson Foundation / Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York
Distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix, New York and Video Data Bank, Chicago

a man guniting a sphere

Nancy Holt, Art in the Public Eye: The Making of Dark Star Park (1988)
Video, color, sound
Duration: 32 minutes, 24 seconds

© Holt/Smithson Foundation / Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York
Distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix, New York and Video Data Bank, Chicago

Nancy Holt, Art in the Public Eye: The Making of Dark Star Park (1988)
Video, color, sound
Duration: 32 minutes, 24 seconds

© Holt/Smithson Foundation / Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York
Distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix, New York and Video Data Bank, Chicago

two people sitting down talking to one another

Nancy Holt, Art in the Public Eye: The Making of Dark Star Park (1988)
Video, color, sound
Duration: 32 minutes, 24 seconds

© Holt/Smithson Foundation / Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York
Distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix, New York and Video Data Bank, Chicago

Nancy Holt, Art in the Public Eye: The Making of Dark Star Park (1988)
Video, color, sound
Duration: 32 minutes, 24 seconds

© Holt/Smithson Foundation / Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York
Distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix, New York and Video Data Bank, Chicago

a person on a bike stops to take a look at Dark Star Park

Nancy Holt, Art in the Public Eye: The Making of Dark Star Park (1988)
Video, color, sound
Duration: 32 minutes, 24 seconds

© Holt/Smithson Foundation / Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York
Distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix, New York and Video Data Bank, Chicago

Nancy Holt, Art in the Public Eye: The Making of Dark Star Park (1988)
Video, color, sound
Duration: 32 minutes, 24 seconds

© Holt/Smithson Foundation / Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York
Distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix, New York and Video Data Bank, Chicago

a person standing and looking at the large spheres in Dark Star Park

Nancy Holt, Art in the Public Eye: The Making of Dark Star Park (1988)
Video, color, sound
Duration: 32 minutes, 24 seconds

© Holt/Smithson Foundation / Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York
Distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix, New York and Video Data Bank, Chicago

Nancy Holt, Art in the Public Eye: The Making of Dark Star Park (1988)
Video, color, sound
Duration: 32 minutes, 24 seconds

© Holt/Smithson Foundation / Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York
Distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix, New York and Video Data Bank, Chicago

a view of the roadways cutting through Dark Star Park

Nancy Holt, Art in the Public Eye: The Making of Dark Star Park (1988)
Video, color, sound
Duration: 32 minutes, 24 seconds

© Holt/Smithson Foundation / Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York
Distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix, New York and Video Data Bank, Chicago

Nancy Holt, Art in the Public Eye: The Making of Dark Star Park (1988)
Video, color, sound
Duration: 32 minutes, 24 seconds

© Holt/Smithson Foundation / Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York
Distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix, New York and Video Data Bank, Chicago

Nancy Holt sitting overlooking the construction site of Dark Star Park

Nancy Holt, Art in the Public Eye: The Making of Dark Star Park (1988)
Video, color, sound
Duration: 32 minutes, 24 seconds

© Holt/Smithson Foundation / Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York
Distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix, New York and Video Data Bank, Chicago

1984—2014

Art in the Public Eye: The Making of Dark Star Park

Nancy Holt
1988
Video, color, sound
Duration: 32 minutes, 24 seconds
© Holt/Smithson Foundation / Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York. Distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix, New York and Video Data Bank, Chicago

Art in the Public Eye: The Making of Dark Star Park documents the process behind the creation of Nancy Holt's Dark Star Park, in Arlington, Virginia. The park, which features large-scale concrete spheres and pipes, allows the visitor to reconsider the experience of space, earth, and sky within an urban context. Invited to create a public sculpture, Holt expanded the invitation to create an urban park. Concrete spheres are interspersed throughout the park, visible through tunnels, reflected in pools of water, and framed in the carved-out hole of another sphere. Once a year, on August 1 at 9:30 am, the shadows of the objects exactly align with outlines on the ground. This date marks the anniversary of the land’s acquisition by William Henry Ross in 1860. ​Dark Star Park contemplates the physical and ideological structures of land ownership while quoting the cosmos.

Interviews with the artist, the architects, engineers, contractors, and the public, among others, reveal Dark Star Park as both a public sculpture and a functioning park that reclaims a blighted urban environment

Writing

Writing by the Artist
figure standing a city park with large concrete spheres behind

Dark Star Park

Nancy Holt

More than five years ago, in the spring of 1979, I was informed by Thomas Parker, then supervisor of the Arlington County Planning Section, that I had been selected to make a sculpture in a small park being planned in Rosslyn, Virginia.

Soon after, I visited the proposed area—a blighted urban site with the buried remains of a gas station and a warehouse, surrounded by broken asphalt, giant weeds, collapsed fencing, fragments of glass, rusty steel, and decaying wood. Since the site was relatively small, my immediate thought was to use all of it to create a park that would be a work of art in itself. Fortunately, both Arlington County and the National Endowment for the Arts were open to this new approach to making art, and I was designated the park designer as well as the sculptor.

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Scholarly Text
View through a tunnel in Nancy Holt's Dark Star Park

Here Before & Where Beyond: "Dark Star Park"

Gretchen Ernster Henderson
Visiting Nancy Holt’s Dark Star Park (1979-1984) in Rosslyn, Virginia, you may walk among trees, reflecting pools, and cement spheres. In a car, you may bypass with barely a glance. Streets lead out of this suburban compression: north to Georgetown and south toward Arlington Cemetery, with highway onramps east to Washington, D.C. and west toward Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains.
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Scholarly Text
two large concrete spheres surrounded by steel poles and shadow markings on the ground in an urban environment

Nancy Holt's "Dark Star Park"

Angela Anderson Adams

Monument wars contesting public space. Controversies arising over renovations of Brutalist landscape design. As the custodian of a world-renowned artist-designed park now in its fourth decade, these recent developments resonate. The idea that public sculpture, parks, and plazas are subject to changing mores as manifestations of our collective identity has never been more evident.1

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The making of Dark Star Park has been long and arduous. I became involved in areas of activity in which I had had limited experience, such as architectural planning, landscape design, contractors’ specifications, engineering, guniting, drainage, sidewalk construction, bureaucratic procedures, etc. Five years is a long time to sustain an art idea and work toward its realization. But during that time possibilities for other works have been evolving out of the intermediate stages, and my concern with the value of making art that is also functional and necessary in society has been reinforced. I hope the precedents established here will continue in future art projects throughout the world.

Nancy Holt

“Dark Star Park.” In Nancy Holt: Sightlines, edited by Alena J. Williams, University of California Press, 2011, pg 118-119. Originally published in a slightly different form in the brochure Dark Star Park: Rosslyn, Arlington County, Virginia: Nancy Holt, produced by Arlington County, Virginia, in 1984 on the occasion of the park’s dedication.

Related Info

1984—2014
three large concrete spheres and one circular tunnel surrounded by trees, grass, and large buildings
Dark Star Park
Nancy Holt
1979-84
1984—2014

Holt designed ​Dark Star Park i​n concert with the development of the site as a whole, integrating landscaping and sculptural features to encompass the neighboring building and adjacent traffic island. Concrete spheres are interspersed throughout the park, visible through tunnels, reflected in pools of water, and framed in the carved-out hole of another sphere. Every year on Dark Star Park Day people gather to watch the shadow alignment.

See Also