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
