Nancy Holt's Locator (Studio Corner) from 1971 is on view in the exhibition Shifting Landscapes at the Whitney Museum of American Art. This marks the first time the work has been installed since the work entered the collection of the Whitney in 2006.
Holt first Installed Locator (Studio Corner) in the studio space she shared with her husband, the artist Robert Smithson, in their New York City loft. Nancy Holt's sculpture evolved directly out of her love for photography and her way of seeing "the world through a circle." Holt's first sculptures were "seeing devices" she called Locators, which altered perception by channeling vision—much like looking through a lens. Locator (Studio Corner) is one of the earliest Locator works that Holt created, and the first that solely engaged interior space. In contrast to other early Locator works that Holt created in her studio—which concentrated vision on preexisting details in the built environment outside Holt's studio window—Locator (Studio Corner) focuses vision on a black shape that Holt painted in the corner of the room. Holt would later refer to these painted or drawn shapes as "loci" and would go on to use this technique in other Locator works such as Locator P.S.1 . When looking through the Locator, the painted shape in the corner of the room transforms into a perfect circle with a halo of light surrounding it, framed by the circular steel pipe: effectively flattening three dimensional space and reframing the viewers understanding of the shape on the wall.
Holt's Locator (Studio Corner) is on view in Shifting Landscapes through January 2026.
From Whitney Museum of American Art:
While the landscape genre has long been associated with picturesque vistas, Shifting Landscapes considers a more expansive interpretation of the category, exploring how evolving political, ecological, and social issues motivate artists as they attempt to represent the world around them. Drawn from the Whitney’s collection, the exhibition features works from the 1960s to the present and is organized according to distinct thematic sections. Some of these coalesce around material and conceptual affinities: sculptural assemblages formed from locally sourced objects, ecofeminist approaches to land art, and the legacies of documentary landscape photography. Others are tied to specific geographies, such as the frenzied cityscape of modern New York or the experimental filmmaking scene of 1970s Los Angeles. Still others show how artists invent fantastic new worlds where humans, animals, and the land become one. Whether depicting the effects of industrialization on the environment, grappling with the impact of geopolitical borders, or proposing imagined spaces as a way of destabilizing the concept of a “natural” world, the works gathered here bring ideas of land and place into focus, foregrounding how we shape and are shaped by the spaces around us.
Shifting Landscapes is organized by Jennie Goldstein, Jennifer Rubio Associate Curator of the Collection; Marcela Guerrero, DeMartini Family Curator; Roxanne Smith, Senior Curatorial Assistant; with Angelica Arbelaez, Rubio Butterfield Family Fellow; with thanks to Araceli Bremauntz-Enriquez and J. English Cook for research support.
