a person sitting on the ground reading with their back against a dark wall and a pile of books sitting on either side of them

Tuesday Texts Program

Holt/Smithson Foundation is committed to developing new research on the work and creative legacies of artists Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson. In June we launch our on-going Scholarly Text Program, which invites thinkers to focus on a single artwork by Holt and/or Smithson.

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 publish new writing.

Through June and July we will publish a new text every Tuesday in our opening series of Tuesday Texts. Each essay includes images selected by the author, a short bibliography, citation reference, and endnotes pointing to the author’s references.

The single artworks range from landmark earthworks and texts to lesser known drawings, moving image works, and barely known performances. 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.

The first Tuesday Text series publishes the following essays:

Gary Shapiro on Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty  (1970)

Barbara Miller on Nancy Holt’s Stone Enclosure: Rock Rings (1977-78)

Craig Dworkin on Robert Smithson’s A heap of Language (1966)

Joy Sleeman on Nancy Holt’s Trail Markers (1969)

Bridget Crone on Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson’s Swamp (1971)

Phyllis Tuchman on Robert Smithson’s A Nonsite (Franklin, New Jersey) (1968)

Aurora Tang on Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson’s Mono Lake (1968/2004)

Amelia Barikin on Robert Smithson’s Rocks and Mirror Square II (1971)

Marin R. Sullivan on Robert Smithson’s Cayuga Salt Mine Project (1969)

Our next Tuesday Text series will be published in Fall 2020.

Still from Nancy Holt, Bob with Books, Roof of 799 Greenwich St., New York, 1971
Color, silent
16 mm film

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.