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

an image of a sign saying 'sun air'

Nancy Holt: Light and Shadow Poetics at the Schindler House, 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 2," 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.

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

Casting a Glance: Dancing with Smithson

In 1968 Robert Smithson declared: “A great artist can make art by simply casting a glance.” On show until January 20, "Casting a Glance: Dancing with Smithson" at Marian Goodman Gallery Los Angeles 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.

four steel pipes extending up from the floor with four viewing pipes pointed at four black painted circles on the wall

Holt's "Locators with Loci" in "Minimal" at the Bourse de Commerce

Nancy Holt's 1972 sculpture "Locators with Loci" were on view in the exhibition "Minimal" at the Bourse de Commerce, Paris between October 8, 2025 and January 18, 2026. Curated by Jessica Morgan, Director of Dia Art Foundation, the exhibition traced the scope Minimal Arr through over a hundred works by some forty international artists.