Holt and Smithson in "Soleil Noir"
Works from Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson will soon be on view in Soleil Noir: Petrole et art contemporain / Black Sun: Petroleum and Contemporary Art at the French Academy in Rome – Villa Medici. Curated by Morad Montazami, Madeleine de Colnet, and Caroline Courrioux, this exhibition uses the theme of oil to address the question of artworks in the era of global warming.
Featured artworks will include Nancy Holt's 10 Billion Barrels of Crude Oil . This work, created during a 1986 visit to Alaska, draws direct attention to the presence of the Trans-Alaska pipeline. Including the names of communities through which the pipeline passes, Holt also notes facts and figures of the pipeline’s construction and impact. To read the text, one must shift positions, a physical disturbance that accentuates the discomfort of the information itself.
Also featured will be Robert Smithson's 1970 film Spiral Jetty, which Smithson describes as "a set of disconnections, a bramble of stabilized fragments taken from things obscure and fluid, ingredients trapped in a succession of frames, a stream of viscosities both still and moving.”
Both of these works continue to be relevant to our systems of industry and production, our concepts of time and history, and the ongoing crisis of climate change today.
The exhibition will be on view from October 9, 2026 to January 18, 2027, and more information on visiting the exhibition is available at the Villa Medici website.
Nancy Holt, “10 Billion Barrels of Crude Oil” (1986)
Black ink on paper
14 x 8 1/2 in. (35.6 x 21.6 cm)
Collection Holt/Smithson Foundation
© Holt/Smithson Foundation / Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York
