A sign in a sunny clearing that says "Sun Gold Date Shop"

Holt’s "California Sun Signs" at Fraenkel Gallery

Nancy Holt’s 1972 photographic series California Sun Signs features in the group exhibition Another West at Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco on show from September 5 though October 19, 2019.

California Sun Signs comprises nineteen inkjet prints on archival rag paper, printed from original 126 format transparencies – a detail of a bullet-peppered sign is seen above. Collected on Holt’s route to the Mojave Desert in 1972, the signs range from a school to a restaurant, a liquor store, and a street sign. From sundae to sundial, and sunset to sunray, this series, all shot in vibrant color, collects the many ways the motif of the sun has been used in signage.

Another West is curated by Richard Misrach, who has been photographing the American West for more than 50 years, and is perhaps best known for his ongoing series Desert Cantos. The exhibition surveys contemporary approaches to the Western United States landscape – which Misrach describes as “eleven different Wests. From Nancy Holt’s 1972 color series California Sun Signs, to Lewis deSoto’s performance-driven long exposures, to Mishka Henner’s appropriated and digitally-composited satellite images of oil derricks, these artists employ photographic strategies and technologies unimaginable in Watkins’s era of the black-and-white mammoth plate. Most significantly, these artists of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries call our attention to what the West has become.”

Nancy Holt, California Sun Signs [detail illustrated above]
From a series of nineteen inkjet prints on archival rag paper
Printed from original 126 format transparencies in 2012
Each 15 x 15 in.

© Holt/Smithson Foundation, licensed by VAGA at ARS, New York

Archived News

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2021 Research Fellow: Scout Hutchinson

We are pleased to announce the second of our 2021 Holt/Smithson Foundation Research Fellowship awardees: Scout Hutchinson.

Scout Hutchinson is a recent graduate of the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU, where she earned an MA in Art History. She has provided curatorial support to art institutions including deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Massachusetts; the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College; the Jewish Museum in New York; and the Fred Jones Jr. Museum at the University of Oklahoma, where she is currently a Mellon Curatorial Intern.

a collaged image of burial mounds with a floating abstract shape

2021 Research Fellow: Ali Ismail Karimi

We are pleased to announce the first of our 2021 Holt/Smithson Foundation Research Fellowship awardees: Ali Ismail Karimi.

Ali Ismail Karimi’s Research Fellowship will focus on Robert Smithson’s 1966 works Grave Mounds with Object and Proposal for a Monument on the Red Sea and the relationship of Smithson’s work to the landscapes of the Middle East.

black and white postcard with the word "revolve" in large print at the top

"Revolve" Screening in The Kitchen's Carlotta Schoolman Video Viewing Room

Nancy Holt's video Revolve is available to stream online through The Kitchen's Video Viewing Room celebrating the work of Carlotta Schoolman. Founded in 1971, The Kitchen is one of New York City’s oldest nonprofit spaces, showing innovative work by emerging and established artists across disciplines. To celebrate their 50th Anniversary, The Kitchen is hosting a series of conversations with artists with accompanying Video Viewing Rooms.