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Announcing the 2023 Research Fellows

We are delighted to announce our 2023 Holt/Smithson Foundation Research Fellows!

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 these four Research Fellows to expand and develop critical research on Holt and Smithson.

2023 Holt/Smithson Foundation Fellows:

Annie Dell'Aria

Annie Dell'Aria's project constructs a full narrative of Nancy Holt's Star-Crossed (1979-80), intersecting with the bureaucratic hurdles and institutional aspirations of a new museum commissioning work on a public university campus, inspiration from Indigenous earthworks of the Miami people, and practical and material challenges to realization and preservation.

Grace Storey

Grace Storey will compile a comprehensive exhibition history for Nancy Holt, from 1969–present. This research project will contribute towards Holt's catalogue raisonné.

José Luis Arroyo-Robles

José Luis Arroyo-Robles project focuses on drawing the speculative route that Nancy Holt, Robert Smithson, and Virginia Dwan may have followed during their journey in the south of Mexico in 1969.

Joy Sleeman

Joy Sleeman's research revisits Holt’s and Smithson’s travels in England and Wales between August 20 and September 30, 1969; places where they spent time, took photographs, and made other forms of art.

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Click on each Research Fellow's name to learn more about their projects and click here to learn more about our Research Fellowship Program.

Archived News

forthcoming

Holt artworks in "All Light: Light and Space yesterday and today" at Kunsthalle Bielefeld

Light was a constant source of fascination for Nancy Holt throughout her four decades of artmaking. Whether drawn from the stars or powered by electricity, she approached light as a phenomenon, an idea, and a material in itself. Three of her pivotal works investigating the perceptual qualities of light are featured in All Light: Light and Space yesterday and today, opening on Friday, November 14, 2025 at Kunsthalle Bielefeld in Germany, and on view through March 1, 2026.

Robert Smithson looking at the camera from the back of a stationwagon loaded with rocks

Casting a Glance: Dancing with Smithson

In 1968 Robert Smithson declared: “A great artist can make art by simply casting a glance.” "Casting a Glance: Dancing with Smithson" at Marian Goodman Gallery Los Angeles 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.

four steel pipes extending up from the floor with four viewing pipes pointed at four black painted circles on the wall

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.