a woman walking up a sand dune hill with her back to the camera

Joan Jonas: An Island Departure at the Farnsworth Art Museum

Joan Jonas: An Island Departure, with Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson is on view at the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine, through March 1, 2026. This collaboration with the Farnsworth presents a newly commissioned body of work by Joan Jonas (b. 1936), developed through our artist commission The Island Project: Point of Departure. 

On September 30, 1971, Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson purchased a small tidal island off the coast of Maine, sight unseen. Accessible on foot only at low tide and protected from development, the island is shaped by weather, erosion, and time. Although Smithson initially sketched ideas for artworks there, when Holt and Smithson visited the site in 1972 t was clear to them that leaving the island to simply be was enough. 

Five decades later, The Island Project: Point of Departure invited five artists—Tacita Dean, Renée Green, Sky Hopinka, Joan Jonas, and Oscar Santillán—to think with the island. Islands are places of continual change: sites of imagination and lived geography that often register environmental and cultural shifts first.

At the Farnsworth, Jonas presents her response to this invitation. A close friend and collaborator of Holt and Smithson, she shared with them a generational rethinking of what art could be. Jonas has created an installation of stones sourced from local granite quarries, mapping the contours of Little Fort Island. These are accompanied by drawings that evoke the island’s presence and agency, alongside recently rediscovered experimental video footage from the early 1970s. Filmed by Jonas at curator Joseph Helman’s home in St. Louis, the footage captures Holt, Smithson, Helman, his family, and the artist Richard Serra in conversation about art and its conditions.

The exhibition also includes works by Holt and Smithson that focus on the island, as well as video and photography in which Jonas appears, including two photographic works by Holt from 1968 and the 1969 video East Coast/West Coast.

The exhibition is organized in partnership with the Farnsworth Art Museum and the Holt/Smithson Foundation, and is co-curated by Farnsworth Chief Curator Jaime DeSimone and our Executive Director, Lisa Le Feuvre.

Nancy Holt, Over the Hill [detail]  (1968)
Inkjet print on archival rag paper; composite made by the artist from original 126 format transparencies
40 x 40 in. (101.6 x 101.6 cm)
Edition of 5 + 1AP
© 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.