Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson seated on chairs in their NYC loft

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

Archived News

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

Casting a Glance: Dancing with Smithson

 "Casting a Glance: Dancing with Smithson" launches at Marian Goodman Gallery Los Angeles on November 8, 2025, with an opening reception between 6 – 8 pm and on show until January 24, 2026. In 1968 Robert Smithson declared: “A great artist can make art by simply casting a glance.” This exhibition 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.

two people looking through sculptural seeing devices at black circular shapes painted on a white 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.