close up shot of a mangrove plant with dark leaves and a stem extending down into the blue ocean water

Weekend Screening: Nancy Holt's "Mangrove Ring"

This weekend we continue with the second screening in our second season of Friday Films: Nancy Holt’s Mangrove Ring (1971).

Mangrove Ring features a sculpture Smithson created in the ocean using mangrove seedlings while traveling in Florida. Off the coast of Summerland Key Smithson planted a ring of mangroves with the intent to grow an island over a three-year period. To learn more about Mangrove Ring and Smithson’s interest in islands, watch the introduction to the film by our Executive Director Lisa Le Feuvre and visit the Robert Smithson Online Viewing Room on the Marian Goodman Gallery website.

Mangrove Ring will be available on Vimeo and InstagramTV from 12 p.m. Mountain Time on Friday, November 20 through to 12 p.m. Mountain Time on Monday, November 23.

Mangrove Ring 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. While in person-viewing of this exhibition is currently suspended in compliance with the national mandate in the UK, we will be screening one of the five films on view in the exhibition online every weekend throughout the end of the year. ⁠View the full schedule here.

We will be taking a break from the Friday Film Program for the Thanksgiving holiday next week. We hope you join us the following week to watch The Making of Amarillo Ramp (1973/2013), a film made by Nancy Holt that documents the completion of Smithson’s final earthwork.  

Still from Nancy Holt, "Mangrove Ring" (1971)

Digitized 16 mm film

Color, sound

Duration: 2 minutes 57 seconds

© Holt/Smithson Foundation, Licensed by VAGA at ARS, New York. Distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix, New York

Archived News

spiral jetty film still

Films by Holt and Smithson on view at The Museum of Modern Art

Three films by Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson are currently on view at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in collection gallery 411 of the David Geffen Wing. This presentation focuses on Spiral Jetty (1970), Swamp (1971), and Sun Tunnels (1978). Newly restored scans of the first two works are presented as part of a collaboration between Holt/Smithson Foundation and MoMA to preserve their moving-image work.

four wooden pillars sticking out of the earth with mountains in the background

Chapter Nine of Tuesday Texts

Throughout February 2026, we are publishing the ninth 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. Developed as a tool for researchers at all stages, the Scholarly Text Program aims to publish two essays on each work, presenting differing opinions and approaches and drawing connections to topics that range from geology and ecology to poetry, architecture, public art, sculpture, drawing, film, philosophy, site, and

signage for an exhibition

"Nancy Holt: Light and Shadow Poetics" at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles

What does it mean to notice how we see? "Nancy Holt: Light and Shadow Poetics" at the MAK Center at the Schindler House in Los Angeles offers an encounter where art and architecture shape perception together. This exhibition to brings Holt’s work into a responsive dialogue with the Schindler House, inviting visitors to experience art and architecture as partners in seeing.

a short typewritten text within a circle, with Nancy Holt's signature in the bottom right corner

Nancy Holt concrete poem on show in Paris at Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles

Nancy Holt started making art in 1966, and her first works took the form of concrete poems: artworks testing the structure, content, and form of language. A key concrete poem, "The World Though a Circle," from 1972 is currently on show in the exhibition Deep Fields at the Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles in Paris until March 23, 2026.