Previously Unpublished Nancy Holt Interview with Builders of Amarillo Ramp Now Available
In 1973 Nancy Holt conducted interviews with two individuals that helped to create Robert Smithson's Amarillo Ramp in Amarillo, Texas. We are delighted to make this previously unpublished tape available for the first time.
The first interview on the tape is with a yet-to-be-identified individual. During this conversation they share thoughts on the local climate and geography, and the effect the seasons will have on the artwork. If you have any information on the yet-to-be-identified speaker at the beginning of the tape, please do get in touch with us at Holt/Smithson Foundation.
In the second interview—featuring Sid Feck, whom Holt credits in The Making of Amarillo Ramp as the front loader operator—they discuss how it felt to drive the machinery out onto the end of the ramp, the color of the stone and process of selecting the stone, and the relationship of the work to "old mother earth."
Amarillo Ramp is Smithson’s final earthwork; while surveying the site in 1973, Smithson was killed in a plane crash alongside pilot Gale Ray Rogers and photographer Richard I. Curtin. The sculpture was posthumously completed by Nancy Holt and artists Tony Shafrazi and Richard Serra, with help from a local team of heavy-machine operators who are featured in these interviews.
Click here to listen to the audio tape and read the transcript.
Still from Nancy Holt, The Making of Amarillo Ramp (1973/2013)
16 mm film
Color, sound
Duration: 31 minutes, 52 seconds
©Holt/Smithson Foundation, Licensed by VAGA at ARS, New York. Distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix.
