Matt Mullican at Archives of American Art: 2026 Holt/Smithson Foundation Annual Lecture
We are very pleased to share details of the 2026 Holt/Smithson Foundation Annual Lecture. Our guest speaker is artist Matt Mullican, and our partner for the fifth event in the series is the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art.
Mullican is an American conceptual artist whose work investigates perception, language, and the systems through which reality is understood. Educated at the California Institute of the Arts, he emerged in the 1970s with a practice that integrates drawing, installation, performance, and symbolic systems into immersive maps of meaning.
In his talk, Mirrors and Melted Telephones, Mullican will reflect on Holt’s systems of vision and Smithson’s attention to matter and entropy through the lens of his own practice. Over his five decades of artmaking, this will be only the fourth time Mullican has given a talk focused on art that is not his own.
The Holt/Smithson Foundation Annual Lecture Series is a ten-year program launched in 2022 that invites artists, writers, and thinkers to extend the creative legacies of Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson. Over the course of a decade, the Foundation will partner with a new institution each year to host lectures in ten distinct locations significant to Holt and Smithson. The Archives holds the papers of Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson, as well as those of Matt Mullican. It is the world’s preeminent and most widely used research center dedicated to collecting, preserving, and providing access to primary sources documenting the history of the visual arts in the Unites States.
Event Details:
Date: Monday, April 27, 2026, at 5:30 pm
Location: McEvoy Auditorium, Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture, 8th and G Streets NW
Tickets: The event is free; advance registration is required.
Registration: RSVP to aaaevents@si.edu
Accommodation requests: aaaevents@si.edu
Matt Mullican working on a drawing in his Berlin studio; February 2026
