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

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

an image of a sign saying 'sun air'

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.

a constellation of the big dipper made of fire pits

Nancy Holt's Starfire acquired by Powder Art Foundation

We are very pleased to share Nancy Holt’s 1986 sculpture "Starfire" has found a permanent home in the collection of Powder Art Foundation in Eden, Utah. Powder Art Foundation is an outdoor art museum that works closely with Dia Art Foundation. "Starfire" comprises eight pits arranged to mirror the Big Dipper constellation and the North Star. The flames create a terrestrial map of the night sky, bringing the energy of distant stars down to earth.

forthcoming

Holt artworks in "All Light: Light and Space yesterday and today" at Kunsthalle Bielefeld

Light was a constant source of fascination for Nancy Holt throughout her four decades of artmaking. Whether drawn from the stars or powered by electricity, she approached light as a phenomenon, an idea, and a material in itself. Three of her pivotal works investigating the perceptual qualities of light are featured in the exhibition "All Light: Light and Space yesterday and today" at Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Germany.