In 1966 Nancy Holt made her first artworks, taking the form of concrete poems. One year later she created Stone Ruin Tour, extending her exploration of language from the page to the landscape and marking her first experiments with sound.

 In June 1967, Holt tape-recorded herself dictating a tour through a crumbling labyrinthine garden with stone walls, overlooks, and disappearing stairways in Cedar Grove, New Jersey. This she transcribed to create an imperfect and unfinished map to explore the site, which was given to artist friends as a guide. 

Between 1967 and 1979 Holt made several audio works. These are sonic analogs to the Locators that she described as being “poems in place.” Tour of the John Weber Gallery is Nancy Holt’s first publicly exhibited tour, made for the eponymous gallery which opened in 1971 in SoHo, New York City. Wall signage directed participants to use an earphone and tape recorder to follow the tour one at a time.