First Annual Holt/Smithson Foundation Lecture
We are very pleased to announce the first in a ten-year series of Annual Lectures, a new Holt/Smithson Foundation program that invites artists, writers, and thinkers to extend the creative legacies of Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson.
Over the course of the next decade, the Foundation will partner with a new institution each year to host lectures in ten distinct locations, each significant to Holt and Smithson. The series launches on November 3, 2022, at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. The first speaker will be the esteemed sculpture scholar Anne M. Wagner. The title of her lecture is "Measures of Distance: Space and Sign in the Work of Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson and Holt." Tickets are available via the website of the Whitney, and the lecture will be live-streamed.
In April 2023, the New Mexico Museum of Art will host the second Annual Lecture, inviting the writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit to think on Holt and Smithson. The third Annual Lecture will take place at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts (UMFA), Salt Lake City, and the further eight lectures in this roaming series will continue through to 2032.
New York, New Mexico, and Utah were important locations for Holt and Smithson. From 1963 they lived together in the West Village in New York City, just a few blocks from the Whitney; from 1995 Holt lived in Galisteo, New Mexico; and Utah is the location of the landmark earthworks Sun Tunnels (1973-76) and Spiral Jetty (1970).
Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson in their Greenwich Street loft, New York City, 1970
Photograph: Gianfranco Gorgoni
