2022 Research Fellow: Margo Handwerker

We are delighted to announce our second 2022 Holt/Smithson Foundation Research Fellowship awardee: Margo Handwerker. 

Margo Handwerker is Chief Curator and Director of the Texas State Galleries at Texas State University. Handwerker holds a Ph.D. from the School of Architecture at Princeton University and a Masters in Art History, Theory, and Criticism from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is a member of M12 STUDIO, a group of artists, researchers, and writers collectively based in Big Springs, Nebraska.

Handwerker’s Fellowship will expand on her doctoral dissertation “Art/Work: The Systems-Oriented Artist Expert, 1968–1984” by focusing on Robert Smithson’s 1972 proposal for Lake Edge Crescents in Ohio.

Robert Smithson, Lake Edge Crescents—Egypt Valley, Ohio—Strip Mine Reclamation Project (1972)

Graphite, paint overlay on aerial photograph

20 x 24 in. (50.8 x 61 cm)

Private collection

© Holt/Smithson Foundation / Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York

Archived News

Casting a Glance: Dancing with Smithson

 "Casting a Glance: Dancing with Smithson" launches at Marian Goodman Gallery Los Angeles on November 8, 2025, with an opening reception between 6 – 8 pm and on show until January 24, 2026. In 1968 Robert Smithson declared: “A great artist can make art by simply casting a glance.” This exhibition takes him at his word and invites eighteen artists to join Smithson on the floor as partners who resist, improvise, and extend the rhythm of his thinking.

Holt's "Locators with Loci" on view in "Minimal" at the Bourse de Commerce

Nancy Holt's 1972 sculpture Locators with Loci is on view in the exhibition Minimal at the Bourse de Commerce, Paris on show through January 18, 2026. Curated by Jessica Morgan, Director of Dia Art Foundation, the exhibition traces the diversity of this Minimal Art since the 1960s through over a hundred works by some forty international artists, many from the Pinault Collection.