a gallery with a projection of a film on the right and a small framed work on the wall on the left

Holt and Smithson films in "Expanding Landscapes: Painting After Land Art" at Lakeland Arts in UK

Works by Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson are on view in Expanding Landscapes: Painting After Land Art at Lakeland Arts Abbot Hall in Kirkland, Kendall, UK.
The exhibition features screenings of Nancy Holt's 1978 film Sun Tunnels and the 1971 collaborative film by Holt and Robert Smithson titled Swamp.

Swamp is a short 16mm film  that explores the mechanics of seeing through site, core concerns of both Holt and Smithson. Looking through the viewfinder of a Bolex camera focused in tight close-up, Holt attempts to walk through the landscape—her field of vision through the camera too narrow for steady progress. Reflecting on Swamp some twenty years later, Holt noted that the film “deals with limitations of perception through the camera eye as Bob and I struggled through a muddy New Jersey swamp. Verbal direction cannot easily be followed. As the reeds crash against the camera lens blocking vision and forming continuously shifting patterns, confusion ensues.”Expanding Landscapes is curated by Rebecca Partridge and Joy Sleeman (one of our 2023 Research Fellows) in collaboration with Helen Stalker. The exhibition “traces the Romantic motifs of earth, sea, and sky through a range of materials and processes.”
The exhibition is on view through September 6, 2025. Learn more about the exhibition through Lakeland Arts.

Installation view: Expanding Landscapes: Painting After Land Art, Lakeland Arts Abbot Hall, Kirkland, Kendall, UK
Photograph: Johannes Pretorius

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

signage for an exhibition

"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.