Nancy Holt: Light and Shadow Poetics at the Schindler House, Los Angeles
We are pleased to share details of the forthcoming exhibition Nancy Holt: Light and Shadow Poetics at the MAK Center at the Schindler House in Los Angeles. It launches February 25, 2026 and is on show through May 24, 2026.
Nancy Holt: Light and Shadow Poetics brings Holt’s study of perception into a close conversation with the Schindler House. In this exhibition light, sound, language, and movement meet as systems for organizing perception.
Across five decades, Holt developed a body of work concerned with how we locate ourselves physically and perceptually within space. She consistently returned to questions of orientation: how attention is guided, how environments are read, and how perception is shaped by context. R.M. Schindler’s Kings Road House (1921-22), with its pinwheel plan, constructed of slab-tilt concrete and conceived to integrate interior and exterior space, is a setting that resonates with these concerns.
At the center of the exhibition is the 1972 photographic poem California Sun Signs, which gathers the word “sun” as it appears across California’s commercial and infrastructural landscape. The exhibition also features Holt’s U.S. 80 SOLO (1976-79), a spoken word piece that she described as a poem in place, works related to her landmark Sun Tunnels project from the mid-1970s, and key photographic works from the late 1960s, including Concrete Poem (1968). Together, they invite visitors to slow down, to listen, and to notice how perception itself unfolds through space.
This exhibition is presented in partnership with Sprüth Magers and Holt/Smithson Foundation. It is curated by our Executive Director, Lisa Le Feuvre, and Executive Director of the MAK Center, Beth Stryker.
Nancy Holt, California Sun Signs (1972; detail)
One of a photo-series of nineteen inkjet prints on archival rag paper, made by the artist in 2012 from original 126 format transparencies.
© Holt/Smithson Foundation / Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York
