Throughout her five decades of artmaking, drawing was a fundamental part of Nancy Holt’s creative thinking. One of her most ambitious projects remains in suspension: Sky Mound, begun in 1984. Four miles from Manhattan, between the New Jersey Turnpike and the Amtrak railway, lies a massive landfill. Holt was recruited to design the reclamation of the site, which would both mitigate environmental damage and transform the landfill into a sculptural observatory. Holt described how, after her first visit, she understood that “the landfill is a place where sky and ground meet, where you can track the Sun, Moon, and stars with the naked eye, and where you have 360-degree panoramic views of Manhattan, Newark, the Pulaski Skyway, networks of highways and train tracks, old steel turn-bridges, and here and there decaying remnants of the Industrial Revolution. As soon as I saw the site I knew that I wanted to transform the landfill into a park/artwork.”

Holt made several drawings to communicate her earthwork, which range from carefully renderings, to map views, and rough sketches. Sky Mound remains in a suspended state, with Holt’s drawings offering the clearest expression of her ideas. Holt used drawing as a medium to think through and articulate her ideas. Her works on paper range from careful detailing to mathematical calculations and full renderings, and this small selection of drawings for Sky Mound shows this scope. Holt saw clear antecedents in archaeological midden mounds and pre-Columbian earthworks, and she understood this project as a new model for how we might confront the waste we create.