a composite of two images

"Teresita Fernández / Robert Smithson" at SITE SANTA FE in 2024

We are pleased to announce the exhibition Teresita Fernández / Robert Smithson launches at SITE SANTA FE in July  2024, in collaboration with SITE SANTA FE and Teresita Fernández. This major exhibition marks the first time Robert Smithson’s work has been placed in conversation with an artist working today. Artist-led and conceptually driven, Teresita Fernández / Robert Smithson is a subjective, intergenerational conversation between two practices. The exhibition critically considers entanglements between place, site, seeing, and deep time through the artists’ mutual engagement with material intelligence, geological agency, and cartographic fictions.

Presenting both iconic and rarely-seen works by Fernández and Smithson, the exhibition organizes their artistic dialogue around a shared desire to recontextualize the complexities of art addressing the land. Teresita Fernández / Robert Smithson is initiated by Fernández’s long-term engagement with challenging socially-constructed ideas about place and landscape, as well as her deep research on the art and ideas of Smithson.

Teresita Fernández / Robert Smithson is an artist-driven model of exhibition-making that pulls the past productively into the present. Both Fernández’s and Smithson’s artistic research is rooted in conceptual questions that engage matter, materiality, land, and place. Fernández's insistence on situating site and landscape in relation to human beings opens a reexamination of Smithson’s work that considers the urgencies of the present. As a whole, Teresita Fernández / Robert Smithson operates as a platform to question how we define place, land, and landscape—as well as who has agency in such places. In doing so, the exhibition seeks to radically shift the art historical perspectives that have sidelined voices of women artists, Indigenous artists, and artists of color.

The exhibition is curated by Lisa Le Feuvre, Executive Director of Holt/Smithson Foundation, and Teresita Fernández, and is organized by SITE SANTA FE.

The exhibition will open on July 5, 2024 and continue through October 28, 2024. Learn more about the exhibition here.

1st Photo: Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty [still] (1970)
© Holt/Smithson Foundation / Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York Distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix, New York

2nd photo: Photo: Teresita Fernández, Caribbean Cosmos(Earth) (Detail) (2023)
Glazed ceramic
96 x 192 x 1.25 inches (243.8 x 487.7 x 3.2 cm)
Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, Seoul, and London
© Teresita Fernández

Archived News

large steel duct coming out of the ground and spanning large gaps with a person standing underneath

Chapter Seven of Tuesday Texts

We are happy to announce that throughout October we are publishing a seventh 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. 

Every Tuesday we will publish a text to our website that includes images selected by the author, a short bibliography, citation reference, and endnotes pointing to the author’s references.

an image of a book with a Smithson drawing on the cover

Letters and early drawings by Robert Smithson published in Centre Pompidou journal

The Fall issue of the Centre Pompidou journal Les cahiers du musée national d’art moderne publishes for the very first time Robert Smithson’s letters and writings from Rome, accompanied by previously unpublished early drawings.

The French language publication includes translations of letters Smithson wrote to Nancy Holt in 1959-1961 and letters Smithson sent to George Lester between 1960 and 1963. George Lester offered Smithson his first solo international exhibition at Galleria George Lester in Rome in 1961.