Holt/Smithson Foundation Annual Lecture Series is a ten-year program that invites artists, writers, and thinkers to extend the creative legacies of Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson.
Over a course of the next decade, the Foundation will partner with a new institution each year to host lectures in ten distinct locations, each significant to Holt and Smithson.
The Holt/Smithson Foundation Annual Lecture Series launches on November 3, 2022, at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.
The first speaker will be the esteemed sculpture scholar Anne M. Wagner. The title of her lecture is "Measures of Distance: Space and Sign in the Work of Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson and Holt."
Tickets are available via the website of the Whitney, and the lecture will be live-streamed.
New York City was an important location for Holt and Smithson; from 1963 they lived together in the West Village in New York City, just a few blocks from the Whitney.
In April 2023, the New Mexico Museum of Art will host the second Annual Lecture, inviting the writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit to think on Holt and Smithson.
New Mexico was a meaningful location for Nancy Holt, where she lived in the small town of Galisteo from 1995.
The third in our ten-year series of Annual Lectures takes place on September 25, 2024. This initiative invites artists, writers, and thinkers to raise questions and present research extending the creative legacies of the artists Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson. Over the course of a decade, we will partner with a new institution each year to host lectures in ten distinct locations, each significant to Holt and Smithson.
The third Annual Lecture takes place at Utah Museum of Fine Arts on Wednesday September 26, 2024 where the keynote speaker is artist Renée Green. Details follow in Spring.
Green is an artist, writer, and filmmaker known for her highly layered and formally complex multimedia installations in which ideas, perception, and experience are examined from myriad perspectives. Her work engages with investigations into circuits of relation and exchange over time, the gaps and shifts in what survives in public and private memories, as well as what has been imagined and invented.
Green’s exhibitions, videos and films have been seen throughout the world in museums and art institutions. In the last decade, her work has been featured in solo or group exhibitions at moCa Cleveland; Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich; KW Institute for Contemporary Art and daadgalerie, Berlin; Carpenter Center for Visual Arts at Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.; MAK Center for Art + Architecture at the Schindler House, West Hollywood; the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the New Museum, all in New York. She is one of our invited artists for the Foundation’s ongoing The Island Project: Point of Departure.