Nancy Holt, Athabascan/Russian Orthodox Graveyards [detail] (1986)
Nine inkjet prints on archival rag paper from original 35mm transparencies
15 x 22 in. (38.1 x 55.9 cm) each
Edition of 3 + 1AP

a snowy graveyard with large house-like structures as gravemarkers

Nancy Holt, Athabascan/Russian Orthodox Graveyards [detail] (1986)
Nine inkjet prints on archival rag paper from original 35mm transparencies
15 x 22 in. (38.1 x 55.9 cm) each
Edition of 3 + 1AP

a Russian orthodox crucifix outisde in the snow at a graveyard

Nancy Holt, Athabascan/Russian Orthodox Graveyards [detail] (1986)
Nine inkjet prints on archival rag paper from original 35mm transparencies
15 x 22 in. (38.1 x 55.9 cm) each
Edition of 3 + 1AP

Nancy Holt, Athabascan/Russian Orthodox Graveyards [detail] (1986)
Nine inkjet prints on archival rag paper from original 35mm transparencies
15 x 22 in. (38.1 x 55.9 cm) each
Edition of 3 + 1AP

Nancy Holt, Athabascan/Russian Orthodox Graveyards (1986)
Installation view: Nancy Holt / Inside Outside, Bildmuseet, Umeå, Sweden, 2022
Nine inkjet prints on archival rag paper from original 35mm transparencies
15 x 22 in. (38.1 x 55.9 cm) each
Edition of 3 + 1AP

an installation image of nine images installed on a gallery wall

Nancy Holt, Athabascan/Russian Orthodox Graveyards [detail] (1986)
Nine inkjet prints on archival rag paper from original 35mm transparencies
15 x 22 in. (38.1 x 55.9 cm) each
Edition of 3 + 1AP

interior space featuring Athabascan/Russian Orthodox iconography

Nancy Holt, Athabascan/Russian Orthodox Graveyards [detail] (1986)
Nine inkjet prints on archival rag paper from original 35mm transparencies
15 x 22 in. (38.1 x 55.9 cm) each
Edition of 3 + 1AP

1984—2014

Athabascan/Russian Orthodox Graveyards

Nancy Holt

1986

Eklutna, Alaska

9 inkjet prints on archival rag paper; made by the artist from original 35 mm color transparencies

Eight prints each 15 × 22 inches (38.1 × 55.9 cm); one print 22 × 15 inches (55.9 × 38.1 cm)

Edition of 3 + 1 AP

While traveling through Southcentral Alaska in March 1986, Nancy Holt visited the towns of Eklutna and Chitina, Alaska, where she created two photographic series: Alaskan Pines and Athabascan/Russian Orthodox Graveyards. Several times Holt turned her photographic eye to graveyards: sites full of enduring sculptural concerns with memorial and material encounters. Western Graveyards (1968) brings together sixty rudimentary gravesites and markers in Lone Pine, California and Virginia City, Nevada, while this series Athabascan/Russian Graveyards (1986) focuses on a particular site in Eklutna, Alaska where Russian Orthodox burial conventions are intertwined with those of the Dena'ina Athabascan people, on whose land the graveyard sits.

Writing

Exhibition Review

a snowy graveyard with large rectangular grave markers

Monica Manolescu

The Alaska photographs are exhibited here for the first time. Set almost twenty years apart, the Western and Alaskan graveyards encode an interest not only in the human transformation of the landscape, but also in the finitude of human life, inscribed and confined in vast natural spaces. The graveyards themselves and the gridded configuration of the photographs adopt the shapes and seriality of Minimalism. Arguably less interested in entropy than Smithson, Holt reflects on temporality in relation to space, articulating the scale of human life, the history of Western settlement and the vast temporal framework of geology.

Monica Manolescu, "Nancy Holt / Inside Outside" July 13, 2023-January 7, 2024, Museum of Contemporary Art, Barcelona (MACBA), Transatlantica. 1 | 2024.

Scholarly Text

Nancy Holt’s "Western Graveyards:" The Comstock Lode, Ichthyosaurs, Land Art, and Nevada’s Legacy of Memory

Amadour

Nancy Holt’s "Western Graveyards" (1968) is a photographic series that preserves the visual record of cemeteries tied to those who lived and labored during the Comstock Lode's peak in Virginia City, Nevada, and of former residents in Lone Pine, California. These sites reveal the entropic logic of settler capitalism, where grave markers serve as silent witnesses linking individual lives to the broader arc of industrial expansion, decline, and the dismantling of ancient land.

Athabascan/Russian Orthodox Graveyards

Writing

Nancy Holt’s "Western Graveyards:" The Comstock Lode, Ichthyosaurs, Land Art, and Nevada’s Legacy of Memory

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