black and white image of the center of a large mine, with spiraling center circle

Tuesday Texts: Chapter Four

We are happy to announce that throughout October we will be publishing a fourth 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.

Both Holt and Smithson opened new ways of thinking about what art might be, and where it might be found. Their ideas resonate through artistic and cultural production of the present, developing innovative ways of exploring our relationship with the planet and expanding the limits of artistic practice. The Scholarly Text Program expands these legacies by commissioning and publishing new writing.

The single artworks range from landmark earthworks and texts to lesser known drawings, moving image works, and rarely seen two-dimensional works. Focused as a tool for researchers at all stages, the Scholarly Text Program will publish two essays on each work, presenting differing opinions and approaches and making links to topics that range from geology to ecology, poetry, architecture, public art, sculpture, drawing, film, philosophy, site, and all the stops between.

Chapter Four of Tuesday Texts publishes the following essays:

Serena Solin, "Asphalt Rundown"

André Leal, "Bingham Copper Mining Pit—Utah / Reclamation Project (1973) and Robert Smithson’s 'land ethic'"

Ali Karimi, "Three Desert Monuments: Revisiting Robert Smithson’s 1966 Collages"

William T. Carson, "Electrical System: An Archaeology of an Artwork"

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Click on the following links to read the essays in previous Chapters of our Tuesday Text series: Chapter One; Chapter Two; Chapter Three.

Robert Smithson, Bingham Copper Mining Pit—Utah / Reclamation Project [detail] (1973)
Photostat, clear plastic overlay, grease pencil, and tape
18 1/2 x 13 1/2 in. (47 x 34.3 cm)
Collection: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Pat and John Rosenwald Gift
© Holt/Smithson Foundation, Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York

Archived News

forthcoming

Holt artworks in "All Light: Light and Space yesterday and today" at Kunsthalle Bielefeld

Light was a constant source of fascination for Nancy Holt throughout her four decades of artmaking. Whether drawn from the stars or powered by electricity, she approached light as a phenomenon, an idea, and a material in itself. Three of her pivotal works investigating the perceptual qualities of light are featured in All Light: Light and Space yesterday and today, opening on Friday, November 14, 2025 at Kunsthalle Bielefeld in Germany, and on view through March 1, 2026.

Robert Smithson looking at the camera from the back of a stationwagon loaded with rocks

Casting a Glance: Dancing with Smithson

In 1968 Robert Smithson declared: “A great artist can make art by simply casting a glance.” "Casting a Glance: Dancing with Smithson" at Marian Goodman Gallery Los Angeles takes him at his word and invites eighteen artists to join Smithson on the floor as partners who resist, improvise, and extend the rhythm of his thinking.

four steel pipes extending up from the floor with four viewing pipes pointed at four black painted circles on the wall

Holt's "Locators with Loci" on view in "Minimal" at the Bourse de Commerce

Nancy Holt's 1972 sculpture Locators with Loci is on view in the exhibition Minimal at the Bourse de Commerce, Paris on show through January 18, 2026. Curated by Jessica Morgan, Director of Dia Art Foundation, the exhibition traces the diversity of this Minimal Art since the 1960s through over a hundred works by some forty international artists, many from the Pinault Collection.