Tuesday Texts: Chapter Three

black and white, four sun tunnels with a person standing looking through one

Our Scholarly Text Program commissions and publishes new writing on single artworks by Holt and/or Smithson, which are then shared digitally through Tuesday Texts. Each Chapter of Tuesday Texts is published through a weekly announcement on Holt/Smithson Foundation's website and social media.

Chapter Three

Julian Myers-Szupinska, "Everything and Nothing: On Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels (1973–76)"

Ron Graziani, "Britannia Beach Project"

Gretchen Ernster Henderson, "Here Before & Where Beyond: Dark Star Park"

James Boaden, "Nancy Holt, Underscan (1974)"

Related Content

Everything and Nothing: On Nancy Holt’s "Sun Tunnels" (1973–76)

Julian Myers-Szupinska

February 2022

Let me tell you some things I like about Earthworks. I use the designation “Earthworks” advisedly. Holt referred to her work as “Land Art,” seeing the quasi-genre of Earth Art and Earthworks as belonging to an earlier group of male artists, despite them also being her contemporaries, peers, and fellow travelers.

drawing by Robert Smithson of a mine shaft

Britannia Beach Project

Ron Graziani

February 2022

It was early in December 1969, while still in negotiations with the government of British Columbia over securing the Miami Islet site for his Island of Broken Glass proposal

View through a tunnel in Nancy Holt's Dark Star Park

Here Before & Where Beyond: "Dark Star Park"

Gretchen Ernster Henderson

February 2022

Visiting Nancy Holt’s Dark Star Park (1979-1984) in Rosslyn, Virginia, you may walk among trees, reflecting pools, and cement spheres. In a car, you may bypass with barely a glance. Streets lead out of this suburban compression: north to Georgetown and south toward Arlington Cemetery, with highway onramps east to Washington, D.C. and west toward Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains.

black and white image of a lamp on a table and a small sign that says "Expect a Miracle"

Nancy Holt, "Underscan" (1974)

James Boaden

February 2022

We locate ourselves in various ways: phenomenologically we understand our bodies within our surroundings, cartographically we measure our position on the earth, imaginatively we locate ourselves in relation to places we call home as much as those we have never visited. Much of Nancy Holt’s work pays close attention to these interlinked processes of locating. Holt’s 1974 video Underscan brings to the fore the act of imaginative location, and its ties to family and care. This act of locating had a lasting impact on her practice.