Weekend Screening: Nancy Holt's "The Making of Amarillo Ramp"

This weekend we continue with the third screening in our second season of Friday Films: Nancy Holt’s The Making of Amarillo Ramp (1973/2013).

The Making of Amarillo Ramp  documents the construction of Robert Smithson's earthwork Amarillo Ramp.  At age thirty-five, while photographing  the site of the earthwork in progress, Smithson died in a small airplane accident, along with pilot Gale Ray Rogers and photographer Richard I. Curtin. After Smithson's passing, Nancy Holt, Richard Serra, and Tony Shafrazi completed Amarillo Ramp according to Smithson's specifications. This film documents the sounds and actions of the powerful machinery necessary to create an earthwork of this scale, while underscoring the human skill and personal relationships that were integral to the completion of the work.

Nancy Holt shot this film on site in 1973, however the film was not edited until 2013. The Making of Amarillo Ramp premiered at the opening of Robert Smithson in Texasat the Dallas Museum of Art in November of 2013.

The Making of Amarillo Ramp is one of the five films included in the solo exhibition Hypothetical Islands at Marian Goodman Gallery London, which is the first solo exhibition of Smithson’s work in the UK. View the full schedule for Season 2 of Friday Films here.

This film will be available on Vimeo and InstagramTV from 12 p.m. Mountain Time on Friday, December 4 through to 12 p.m. Mountain Time on Monday, December 7. A video introduction to the film by DeeDee Halleck, a media activist and close friend of Nancy Holt, will be shared on Thursday evening before the screening.

We hope you join us next week to watch Bob with Books (1971), a short film made by Nancy Holt that shows Smithson sitting on the roof of their loft in New York City, drinking a beer and reading from a tall stack of books.

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.

Archived News

Nancy Holt: Circles of Light at Gropius Bau, Berlin

Holt/Smithson Foundation and Gropius Bau are pleased to announce the most comprehensive presentation of Nancy Holt in Germany to date. Taking a journey through Holt’s output, starting with her first artwork made in 1966, Circles of Light expands over the Gropius Bau’s ground floor and atrium. Paying attention to Holt’s experimental approach to the interplay between the immaterial and the material, this exhibition underscores the singularity of Holt’s oeuvre.

Chapter Six of Tuesday Texts

We are happy to announce that throughout January we will be publishing a sixth 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. This chapter of Tuesday Texts will focus on artworks by Robert 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.