a tree sticking out of the sand upside down on a beach

Smithson’s "Upside-down Trees" at MoCA, Krakow

In April 1969 Virginia Dwan, Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson took a trip to Mexico, and made an unannounced stop in Captiva Island, Florida to see Robert Rauschenberg. Here Smithson made the second in a series of artworks titled Upside-Down Trees, which can be seen illustrated above. The first was made in Alfred, New York State, and the third in the Yucatán, Mexico.

Dwan, Holt and Smithson went on a number of trips together. On this April 1969 journey they visited Sanibel Island in Florida before Captiva Island, and travelled on to Mérida, Mexico. In September 1969, Artforum International published an illustrated narrative of this trip, titled Incidents of Mirror Travel in the Yucatán. Smithson describes how in Yucatán ‘the third upside-down tree was planted. The first is in Alfred, New York State, the second is in Captiva Island, Florida; lines drawn on a map will connect them. Are they totems of rootlessness that relate to one another? Do they mark a dizzy path from one doubtful point to another? Is this a mode of travel that does not in the least try to establish a coherent coming and going between the here and the there?’

The art historian James Meyer describes: ‘To bury a tree upside down is a violent reversal of its natural state, an upending of its vitalist associations. [. . .] On the sunny beach at Captiva the second ‘Upside-Down Tree’ announced an entropic eternity devoid of human history and organic life, an earth seethed in crystals and sheets of ice.’ [James Meyer, ‘Los Angeles to New York: Dwan Gallery 1959-1971’. National Gallery of Art 2017]

A slide show of images relating to all three of Smithson’s Upside-Down Trees is on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Krakow from April 26. Bringing together over seventy artworks, Nature in Art explores how human beings have exploited and attempted to master nature, addressing the question through beauty, ecology, confrontation, matter and symbollism.

Robert Smithson, Upside Down Tree II (1969)
Captiva Island, FL, USA

©Holt/Smithson Foundation, Licensed by VAGA at ARS

Archived News

spiral jetty film still

Films by Holt and Smithson on view at The Museum of Modern Art

Three films by Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson are currently on view at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in collection gallery 411 of the David Geffen Wing. This presentation focuses on Spiral Jetty (1970), Swamp (1971), and Sun Tunnels (1978). Newly restored scans of the first two works are presented as part of a collaboration between Holt/Smithson Foundation and MoMA to preserve their moving-image work.

four wooden pillars sticking out of the earth with mountains in the background

Chapter Nine of Tuesday Texts

Throughout February 2026, we are publishing the ninth chapter of our Tuesday Text Series as part of our ongoing Scholarly Text Program, which invites thinkers to focus on a single artwork by Holt and/or Smithson. Developed as a tool for researchers at all stages, the Scholarly Text Program aims to publish two essays on each work, presenting differing opinions and approaches and drawing connections to topics that range from geology and ecology to poetry, architecture, public art, sculpture, drawing, film, philosophy, site, and

signage for an exhibition

"Nancy Holt: Light and Shadow Poetics" at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles

What does it mean to notice how we see? "Nancy Holt: Light and Shadow Poetics" at the MAK Center at the Schindler House in Los Angeles offers an encounter where art and architecture shape perception together. This exhibition to brings Holt’s work into a responsive dialogue with the Schindler House, inviting visitors to experience art and architecture as partners in seeing.

a short typewritten text within a circle, with Nancy Holt's signature in the bottom right corner

Nancy Holt concrete poem on show in Paris at Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles

Nancy Holt started making art in 1966, and her first works took the form of concrete poems: artworks testing the structure, content, and form of language. A key concrete poem, "The World Though a Circle," from 1972 is currently on show in the exhibition Deep Fields at the Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles in Paris until March 23, 2026.