We are delighted to announce that Nancy Holt: Power Systems is now on view at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus Ohio. The solo exhibition features the most extensive inquiry to date into Nancy Holt's studies of systems, focusing on her interactive site-responsive sculptural installations that expose the basic technological systems found in the built environment. 

Nancy Holt: Power Systems is curated by Lisa Le Feuvre, Executive Director of Holt/Smithson Foundation. The exhibition Maria Hupfield: The Endless Return of Fabulous Panther (Biimskojiwan), which is also curated by Lisa Le Feuvre, is on view simultaneously at the Wexner Center for the Arts. Both exhibitions are on view through June 29, 2025.

Learn more about Nancy Holt: Power Systems on the exhibition page  and in the description below:

Holt’s earliest works utilized the written and spoken word, exploring language as a system structuring perception and understanding of place. She used standard office reprographic technology—the tape recorder, the fax machine, and the photocopier—to execute and distribute her works on paper, reprographic tools that were the new media of her time. Two years after making her first artwork, she started to explore photography during her travels, creating series capturing systems of signage, of land ownership, and of the unpredictability of the weather on the surfaces of urban asphalt. The 1969 photographic series Texas Claims is a study of private property and nature’s refusal of borders.

In the early 1970s, she forced her voice into spaces exhibiting art, creating audio works that she called “poems in place”—soundscapes that formed pictures of her physical explorations. Holt was as interested in the built environment as she was natural and celestial landscapes. A fascination with the cycles of the sun and moon, and with the sun as a source of energy, inspired her landmark earthwork Sun Tunnels (1973–76) and the corresponding film, which is on view at the Wex.

In the 1980s Holt’s exploration of systems focused on the fabric of the built environment with functional sculptural installations created with standard industrial materials, which she termed System Works. As Holt described, “The electrical systems light, the heating systems heat. The drainage systems drain, the ventilation systems circulate air […] the sculptures are exposed fragments of vast hidden systems, they are part of open-ended systems, part of the world.”

Nancy Holt: Power Systems features the first posthumous presentation of Heating System (1984-85), a room-sized sculpture that exposes heating infrastructure. Steel pipes twist and loop around the exhibition space, punctuated by gauges and radiators, with a valve wheel at the structure’s center. Visitors are invited to turn this wheel, enabling them to have control over the flow of hot water through the pipes, and thus the temperature of the room. Inside the exhibition space a gauge on the wall records changes in temperature and humidity in red and blue ink on a piece of graph paper, meaning "the sculpture produced its own drawing, which I thought was an interesting idea." Holt had a continuous practice of drawing, and Nancy Holt: Power Systems includes previously unexhibited works on paper showing Holt’s ideas for both realized and unrealized System Works.

In all the works in the exhibition, Holt draws our attention to the hidden structures that we rely on every day. In making them visible, she allows us to see not only what is there, but what is possible and what they make impossible.