2023 Annual Lecture: Rebecca Solnit at the New Mexico Museum of Art

Holt/Smithson Foundation announces the second in the ten-year series of Annual Lectures, an initiative that invites artists, writers, and thinkers to raise questions and present research extending the creative legacies of the artists Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson. Over the course of a decade, the Foundation will partner with a new institution each year to host lectures in ten distinct locations, each significant to Holt and Smithson.

The second Annual Lecture takes place at the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe on Saturday April 1, 2023 where the keynote speaker is Rebecca Solnit. The event will start with a presentation by DesertArtLAB, and will close with a discussion between Solnit, writer and activist Lucy Lippard and Executive Director of Holt/Smithson Foundation, Lisa Le Feuvre. The event will be livestreamed. In 1995 Nancy Holt moved to Galisteo, New Mexico and Santa Fe is the home base of Holt/Smithson Foundation.

Solnit’s 2023 Holt/Smithson Foundation Annual Lecture is titled “Everything Is Connected: Nancy Holt in the Landscape of Ideas.” She will talk about Nancy Holt as an environmental artist who points the viewer toward perception of order and pattern already present in the landscape, focusing on Holt’s commitment to directing viewers toward a deep engagement with place and paying attention to her thinking in the larger contexts of her time and of ours. Solnit will contemplate Holt as a student of Buddhism, whose teachings emphasize nonseparation and nonduality; as a New Mexican living in a landscape where Indigenous worldviews have a strong presence; and as a citizen of a time in which scientists increasingly show us a world of mutuality, collaboration, and interconnection. She will also think about the weather: the climate movement recognizes interconnectedness as the necessary basis for our political decisions about energy, land, nature, and values.

Location:     

Saint Francis Auditorium at New Mexico Museum of Art, 107 West Palace Ave, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501

Schedule:         

10:50             Doors open

11:00 am      Welcome / orientation: Shannon Bay (Deputy Director of New Mexico Museum of Art)

11:10 am       DesertArtLAB presentation

11:50 am      Lisa Le Feuvre (Executive Director, Holt/Smithson Foundation) chairs discussion, with audience invited to respond

12:10 pm      Morning session closes

1:15 pm         Doors open

1:30 pm        Welcome back: Shannon Bay

1:35 pm        Rebecca Solnit presentation

2:10 pm        Lucy Lippard joins Rebecca Solnit, with Lisa Le Feuvre as chair with audience invited to respond

2:40 pm       Discussion closes

Bookings:    

Tickets are free, with booking recommended         

Livestream Links

Holt/Smithson Foundation Annual Lecture Series- Morning Session

Holt/Smithson Foundation Annual Lecture Series- Afternoon Session

https://www.youtube.com/@nmmoa

Learn more about the event and the speakers in the second Annual Lecture on this page.

Nancy Holt standing in one of the Sun Tunnels in Utah's Great Basin Desert in 1976
Photograph: Ardele Lister
© Holt/Smithson Foundation / Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York

Archived News

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.

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.