a film still showing Sun Tunnels

"Nancy Holt: The World Through a Circle" opens  at Dia Beacon July 2027

We are pleased to share that Dia Art Foundation will present Nancy Holt: The World Through a Circle, a focused solo exhibition at Dia Beacon, opening July 9, 2027.

Over five decades, Nancy Holt created artworks that moved between the studio and the landscape, encompassing sculpture, installation, film, and video. Bringing Holt's room-sized installation Mirrors of Light I (1974) and the sculpture Locator with Mirror (1972) into dialogue with a carefully selected group of moving-image works, Nancy Holt: The World Through a Circle examines her sustained investigation of perception, particularly the ways in which light shapes our experience of time and space.

The exhibition takes its title from Holt's concrete poem The World Through a Circle (ca. 1970), connecting her early experiments with language to her investigations of perception across different materials and artistic forms. By tracing the development of Holt's ideas across different media, this exhibition offers insight into her exploration of the relationship between art and landscape, as exemplified by Holt’s landmark Sun Tunnels (1973–76), in northwestern Utah’s Great Basin Desert, which is stewarded by Dia.

In a statement dating from around 1975, Holt described her artistic concerns: “Using a variety of materials, steel, cement, mirror, quarto, light, video, film, I am concerned primarily with the concretization of perception. My work is made to be seen in depth from multiple points of view.”

Source: Nancy Holt, statement ca. 1975, quoted in Micky Donnelly, “Nancy Holt Interviewed by Micky Donnelly,” CIRCA, no. 11 (July–August 1983), pp. 4–10. 

Nancy Holt: The World Through a Circle, is curated by Dia Art Foundation’s Jordan Carter, curator, and Emily Markert, curatorial associate.

Nancy Holt, film still from Sun Tunnels (1978)
16mm film, color, sound; duration: 26 minutes, 31 seconds. 
© Holt/Smithson Foundation / Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York. 

Archived News

a notebook showing calculations for Sun Tunnels

Nancy Holt’s Project Files Digitized at the Archives of American Art

The papers of Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson are held at the Smithsonian Institution's Archives of American Art. This series documents more than 50 projects developed by Holt from the late 1970s to the late 1990s, offering insights into her working processes and the development of her ideas from initial conception through to completion.

poster for Smithson's film Spiral Jetty 1970 cropped

Soft Network Benefit Auction

We are pleased to participate in the Soft Network Benefit Auction, open on Artsy from September 23 until October 7, 2026. The auction brings together works in support of Soft Network and the Artist Foundations and Estate Leaders List (AFELL), an international network for artists and stewards of artists’ estates and legacies. Holt/Smithson Foundation has donated two rare works of art by Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson to the auction to help further this goal. 

Nancy Holt's "Starfire" (1986) as installed at the Powder Art Foundation, Utah, 2025

“Starfire” at Powder Art Foundation Fall Open Day and Utah Museum of Fine Arts Land Art Week

On October 2, from 11 am to 3 pm, Powder Art Foundation will host a Fall Open House at Powder Mountain in Eden, Utah where Nancy Holt’s Starfire (1986) can be experienced. Starfire joined the collection of Powder Art Foundation last year. The sculpture comprises eight fire pits arranged in the configuration of the Big Dipper and the North Star, bringing the sky down to earth.