blue book cover with plain, brown, sans serif font

Dia Art Foundation's "Artists on Robert Smithson"

This spring Dia Art Foundation publishes the fifth volume in their Artists on Artists series of books with Artists on Robert Smithson. This lecture and publication program was established in 2001, and it invites artists working today discuss in-depth artists whose work is held in Dia’s collection.

The contributors to Artists on Robert Smithson engage with Smithson’s work in myriad ways. Matthew Buckingham’s essay highlights Smithson’s preoccupation with the ways histories of the earth are constructed and contested, while Abraham Cruzvillegas considers Smithson’s work with broken glass and architecture. Through a playful, didactic approach Mark Dion's piece recounts, from prehistoric times onward, the conceptual and evolutionary conditions that led to the artist's birth and development. Teresita Fernández confronts the dominant histories of place, art, and concepts of the monumental and Trevor Paglen considers Smithson’s iconic spiral and his fascination with natural history. Rayyane Tabet, the most recent lecture in the collection, weaves together a history of basalt that reveals themes of colonialism, surveillance, and strife. Finally, engaging with the science-fiction canon and its cinematic conventions, Diana Thater provides a close reading of Smithson’s Spiral Jetty film.

To purchase, visit Dia’s on-line bookshop.

Archived News

spiral jetty film still

Films by Holt and Smithson on view at The Museum of Modern Art

Three films by Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson are currently on view at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in collection gallery 411 of the David Geffen Wing. This presentation focuses on Spiral Jetty (1970), Swamp (1971), and Sun Tunnels (1978). Newly restored scans of the first two works are presented as part of a collaboration between Holt/Smithson Foundation and MoMA to preserve their moving-image work.

four wooden pillars sticking out of the earth with mountains in the background

Chapter Nine of Tuesday Texts

Throughout February 2026, we are publishing the ninth 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. Developed as a tool for researchers at all stages, the Scholarly Text Program aims to publish two essays on each work, presenting differing opinions and approaches and drawing connections to topics that range from geology and ecology to poetry, architecture, public art, sculpture, drawing, film, philosophy, site, and

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"Nancy Holt: Light and Shadow Poetics" at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles

What does it mean to notice how we see? "Nancy Holt: Light and Shadow Poetics" at the MAK Center at the Schindler House in Los Angeles offers an encounter where art and architecture shape perception together. This exhibition to brings Holt’s work into a responsive dialogue with the Schindler House, inviting visitors to experience art and architecture as partners in seeing.

a short typewritten text within a circle, with Nancy Holt's signature in the bottom right corner

Nancy Holt concrete poem on show in Paris at Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles

Nancy Holt started making art in 1966, and her first works took the form of concrete poems: artworks testing the structure, content, and form of language. A key concrete poem, "The World Though a Circle," from 1972 is currently on show in the exhibition Deep Fields at the Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles in Paris until March 23, 2026.