Events at Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden: 35th anniversary of Holt’s ‘Dark Star Park’

In 1984 Nancy Holt completed Dark Star Park in the Rosslyn neighborhood of Arlington, Virginia, one of the first examples of integrated public art in the United States. 2019 is the thirty-fifth anniversary of the sculpture, and in celebration Holt/Smithson Foundation partners with the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden and Arlington Public Art to present a series of events.

Dark Star Park (1979-1984) is emblematic of Holt’s commitment to temporal and site-responsive sculpture. Located within a busy traffic intersection on a once-overlooked pocket of land, it features large, gunite spheres resembling fallen, extinguished stars alongside tunnels and vertical poles. Each year at 9:32 am on August 1, the day in 1860 that William Henry Ross acquired the land that became Rosslyn, the sun aligns with the sculpture to create shadow-images on the ground.

On Wednesday July 31, 2019 at 6:30pm a panel discussion titled Seconds, Hours, Minutes, Days, Decades: Time in Public Sculpture takes place at the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden with Angela Adams (Founding Director, Arlington Public Art), Lisa Le Feuvre (Executive Director, Holt/Smithson Foundation), Brett Littman (Director, The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum) and Anne Reeve (Curator, Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden)

On Thursday August 2, 2019 at 12:30pm and Saturday August 4, 2019 at 2pm the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden presents a Nancy Holt film screening, introduced by Lisa Le Feuvre, featuring Holt’s Art in the Public Eye: The Making of Dark Star Park and Sun Tunnels.

Nancy Holt
Dark Star Park (1979-84)
Photograph: Tom Martinelli, taken on Dark Star Park Day, August 1, 2009

Art © Holt/Smithson Foundation, licensed by VAGA at ARS, New York

Archived News

Nancy Holt: Circles of Light at Gropius Bau, Berlin

Holt/Smithson Foundation and Gropius Bau are pleased to announce the most comprehensive presentation of Nancy Holt in Germany to date. Taking a journey through Holt’s output, starting with her first artwork made in 1966, Circles of Light expands over the Gropius Bau’s ground floor and atrium. Paying attention to Holt’s experimental approach to the interplay between the immaterial and the material, this exhibition underscores the singularity of Holt’s oeuvre.

Chapter Six of Tuesday Texts

We are happy to announce that throughout January we will be publishing a sixth 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. This chapter of Tuesday Texts will focus on artworks by Robert 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.