From October 5, 2024 until April 20, 2025 a focused presentation of Nancy Holt’s Locators takes place at the Art Institute of Chicago, on the Bluhm Family Terrace.

In the early 1970s, Holt created her first sculpture, a viewing device that she called a Locator. Made from two pieces of welded steel pipe, with a viewing aperture set at the height of her own eyes, the Locator became a powerful means for Holt to ground her viewer in the conscious process of perception. The first Locators were installed in Holt’s New York studio in 1971. From here she could train a viewer’s eye on overlooked aspects of the urban landscape, focusing attention on found elements, such as ventilators on nearby rooftops or windows on neighboring buildings. She then created site-responsive installations, using the Locator as an apparatus to frame surprising passages in the built environment, which she selected and marked with paint. 

Nancy Holt: Seeing in the Round, conceived in collaboration between the Foundation and the Art Institute of Chicago, presents two historical works—Dual Locators (1972) and Locator (PS1) (1980)— for the first time out-of-doors on a sculpture terrace, where the interior and exterior architecture of the museum are in constant dialogue with each other and the surrounding city. Drawing awareness to the act of looking, these devices ask us to attend to our individual experience of vision, while challenging the presumption that how we see is in any way self-evident. In counterpoint, the two 1971 sculptures Locator (Exhaust Pipe) and Locator (Two Windows) are on show indoors, in the adjoining Terzo Piano space.

Nancy Holt: Seeing in the Round is curated by Caitlin Haskell, Gary C. and Frances Comer Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, and Makayla May, curatorial associate, Modern and Contemporary Art. The exhibition is organized by the Art Institute of Chicago with major funding from the Bluhm Family Endowment Fund, which supports exhibitions of modern and contemporary sculpture.