2024 Annual Lecture—Renée Green at Utah Museum of Fine Arts

August 21, 2024

We are very happy to announce the details of the third edition our Annual Lecture Series, 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, we partner with a different institution each year to host lectures in ten distinct locations, each significant to Holt and Smithson.

In 2024 artist Renée Green is our invited speaker for this year’s lecture, which takes place at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City on Friday, September 27, 2024. Green’s talk is titled Imagining Contact: Then, When, Now, Here and, following the presentation, she will be in conversation with Lisa Le Feuvre, Executive Director of Holt/Smithson Foundation.

Renée Green is an artist, writer, and filmmaker known for her multimedia installations in which she explores memory, perception, and experience. In 2024, Green is in the process of creating several new projects, and again returns to the work and thoughts of Smithson, as well as those of Nancy Holt. At present, she is developing new works for Holt/Smithson Foundation’s The Island Project: Point of Departure; for Western Washington University Sculpture Collection, which hosts Holt’s Stone Enclosure: Rock Rings (1977-1978); and for Dia Art Foundation, which is the steward of two of the most iconic earthworks from the late twentieth century: Holt’s Sun Tunnels (1973-1976), and Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970), both located in Utah.

Green’s expansive installation Partially Buried in Three Parts (1996-1997) began with a reflection on Smithson’s Partially Buried Woodshed, an earthwork constructed at Kent State University in January 1970. Working with students, Smithson requested twenty-two truckloads of earth be moved from a construction site on campus to the site beside an abandoned woodshed. Using a backhoe, the dirt was poured on top of the woodshed to partially bury the building. When the central beam cracked, the process was complete.

Less than four months later, Partially Buried Woodshed, and Kent State University, underwent seismic change. On May 4 a campus protest against the war in Vietnam initiated National Guard soldiers firing sixty-seven bullets in thirteen seconds at unarmed students, killing four and wounding nine others. Soon afterwards the words MAY 4 KENT 70 were spray-painted on the woodshed. Over time, Partially Buried Woodshed disappeared, and today it is primarily known through Smithson’s drawings and photoworks. Green’s tripartite multimedia installation—comprising Partially Buried (1996), Übertragen/Transfer (1997), and Partially Buried Continued (1997)— grew out of a consideration of the year 1970. In the process of working the associations became denser, with Green’s work becoming a formal and conceptual archaeological endeavor reflecting on the vagaries of memory and historical recall.

In considering Holt and Smithson in the present, Green reflects: “As I read, I continue to wonder about that distant time, then, when things happened differently. The traces I find in books stimulate curiosity to further wonder about the places referenced in images, a wish to see what is here, or there, now; I am curious too about what cannot be seen in the images. Questions of both space and place arise. Questions of time also arise. Questions of travel, questions of the environment, built and unbuilt, emerge too as I think and feel, now, here. On earth.”

Holt/Smithson Foundation’s Annual Lecture Series launched in 2022 at The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, with Anne Wagner, and in 2023 was hosted by New Mexico Museum of Art, with Rebecca Solnit, Lucy Lippard and Desert Artlab as speakers. In 2025 the program travels to the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, the Netherlands, and in 2026 to the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.

The talk is free of charge and registration is encouraged via this link. The event will be recorded and available on the websites of Holt/Smithson Foundation and Utah Museum of Fine Arts.