Desert in the foreground with blue mountains in the background. In the mid-ground is a dilapidated wood structure and a figure.

Holt’s film ‘Utah Sequences’ at UMFA

Utah Museum of Fine Arts at the University of Utah  (UMFA) presents the first showing of Nancy Holt’s film Utah Sequences (1970), launching February 14, 2020. Please check UMFA’s websites for details for schedules before visiting.

Shot on Super 8 film, Utah Sequences shows Holt’s deep investigation of Utah’s landscape. Created six years before the completion of Sun Tunnels (1973–76), Holt’s earthwork situated in Utah’s west desert, this film explores the manmade and natural environment at Rozel Point on the north arm of Great Salt Lake. The film captures wood cabins, an amphibious vehicle, and remnants of oil drilling that have largely disappeared from the site today. By contrast, the tar-seeps and salt-encrusted pelicans so present in this film remain a constant at the site.

Holt’s film shows the artist Robert Smithson, the gallerist Virginia Dwan, the photographer Gianfranco Gorgoni, and one yet-to-be-identified-person as they prepare for the construction of Smithson’s iconic earthwork Spiral Jetty (1970), a giant coil of black basalt rocks that juts into Great Salt Lake at Rozel Point. The film contains a section Holt refers to as ‘Mica Spread’ (seen above) where Smithson empties bags of mica, a mineral often used as an insulator, found at an abandoned cabin. Fifty years after Smithson built Spiral Jetty, Utah Sequences sheds light on Holt and Smithson’s time in Utah and invites conversations about entropy, timescales, and the human impact on the environment.

At Holt/Smithson Foundation we are led by research. During this presentation, which shows though to August 2, 2020, we will work with researchers to learn more about this remarkable film.

Nancy Holt, Utah Sequences [still] (1970)
Super 8 film
Color, silent
Duration: 9 minutes, 26 seconds

© Holt/Smithson Foundation / Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York

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.