Between November 2025 and March 2026, works by Nancy Holt were included in All Light: Light and Space yesterday and today , a group exhibition dedicated to light as an artistic medium.

Light was a sustained fascination for Nancy Holt throughout her five decades of artmaking. Whether emanating from the stars or powered by electrical grids, Holt approached light as a phenomenon, an idea, and a material. Many of her works investigate the relationship between light and sight, manipulating illumination to draw attention to its perceptual properties. Three artworks that exemplify these concerns were selected for the exhibition: Locator with Spotlight and Sunlight(1972), Dual Locators (1972), and Light and Shadow Photo-Drawings (1978).

Looking up through Locator with Spotlight and Sunlight, one sees an ellipse of light cast by a spotlight aimed at the wall; when viewed through the Locator, this ellipse resolves into a perfect orb. Moving around the sculpture to face the opposite direction, one looks through a circular aperture in the window to the outdoors. In her text "The Dialectics of Locator with Spotlight and Sunlight," Holt articulates her interest in the contrast between the constant artificial glow of electric light and ever-changing natural light. By channeling vision through the Locator and manipulating light through spatial interventions in Locator with Spotlight and Sunlight, Holt draws parallels between light and sight and poses questions about the interrelated nature of these two phenomena.

Dual Locators is a sculpture that inhabits space through two aligned metal Locators and two circular elements positioned on opposing walls. The view through one Locator perfectly frames a large black painted Locus on one wall, while a circular mirror fills one's vision when looking through the sculpture in the reverse direction.

Nancy Holt photographed the series Light and Shadow Photo-Drawings in 1978 as a study of how light and shadow can be made material. To produce the works, she shone light through various curved cutouts and photographed the resulting forms as they were projected onto an opposing wall using 35mm film. In this series—which is one of her many investigations of light—Holt distills the photographic medium to its essence. By referring to the images as “drawings,” she points to the origins of photography, where the process was described by Henry Fox Talbot as being the “pencil of nature.” Without a recognizable subject, Light and Shadow Photo-Drawings invites viewers to observe the interplay of light and shadow and to grapple with the workings of their own perception.

All Light includes artworks by Larry Bell, Angela Bulloch, Mary Corse, Olafur Eliasson, Nancy Holt, Robert Irwin, Tatsuo Miyajima, and others.