a collaged image of burial mounds with a floating abstract shape

2021 Research Fellow: Ali Ismail Karimi

We are pleased to announce the second of our 2021 Holt/Smithson Foundation Research Fellowship awardees: Ali Ismail Karimi.

Ali Ismail Karimi’s Research Fellowship will focus on Robert Smithson’s 1966 works Grave Mounds with Object and Proposal for a Monument on the Red Sea and the relationship of Smithson’s work to the landscapes of the Middle East.

Ali is a Bahraini architect whose work explores social housing, public space, and the landscape of the GCC countries. He is, along with Hamed Bukhamseen, co-founder of Civil Architecture, an architecture office based in Manama and Kuwait City whose work has been shown in the Sharjah Architecture Triennale, Oslo Triennale, Seoul Biennale, and Amman Design Week. Together they curated the Kuwait Pavilion “Between East and West: A Gulf“ at the 2016 Venice Biennale.   

Our Research Fellowships aim to encourage new research on the work, ideas, and creative legacies of Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson. We look forward to thinking with Ali to expand and develop critical research on the works of Robert Smithson.

Robert Smithson, Grave Mounds with Object (1966)

Magazine photo collage

 6 x 7 5/8 in. (15.2 x 19.4 cm)

©Holt/Smithson Foundation, Licensed by VAGA at ARS, New York

Archived News

a tropical plant in a canopy of nets

Florida Friday Films

In May of 1971 Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt returned to Florida to visit the Florida Keys, with Smithson seeking potential locations for his Island Maze and Forking Island. While these hypothetical earthworks exist today solely through Smithson's drawings, on this trip Smithson did plant an earthwork he called Mangrove Ring—which is also the subject of a short film of the same name by Nancy Holt. 

large steel duct coming out of the ground and spanning large gaps with a person standing underneath

Chapter Seven of Tuesday Texts

We are happy to announce that throughout October we are publishing a seventh chapter of our Tuesday Text Series as part of our ongoing Scholarly Text Program, which invites thinkers to focus on a single artwork by Holt and/or Smithson. 

Every Tuesday we will publish a text to our website that includes images selected by the author, a short bibliography, citation reference, and endnotes pointing to the author’s references.

an image of a book with a Smithson drawing on the cover

Letters and early drawings by Robert Smithson published in Centre Pompidou journal

The Fall issue of the Centre Pompidou journal Les cahiers du musée national d’art moderne publishes for the very first time Robert Smithson’s letters and writings from Rome, accompanied by previously unpublished early drawings.

The French language publication includes translations of letters Smithson wrote to Nancy Holt in 1959-1961 and letters Smithson sent to George Lester between 1960 and 1963. George Lester offered Smithson his first solo international exhibition at Galleria George Lester in Rome in 1961.