a bulldozer driving on a circular ramp of red earth

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 Texas, at 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

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.