Western Graveyards
Nancy Holt
1968
Sixty inkjet prints on archival rag paper from original 126 format transparencies
18 × 18 in. (45.7 × 45.7 cm) each
Edition of 3 + 1AP
© Holt/Smithson Foundation / Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York
Nancy Holt’s Western Graveyards was photographed in 1968 and comprises a series of sixty inkjet prints on archival rag paper. Several times Holt turned her photographic eye to graveyards: sites full of enduring sculptural concerns with memorial and material encounters. Western Graveyards brings together rudimentary gravesites and markers in Lone Pine in the Owens Valley of eastern California, and Virginia City in Nevada. Other series where she pays attention to burial sites include Athabascan/Russian Orthodox Graveyards (1986), which focuses on a particular site in Eklutna, Alaska, where Russian Orthodox burial conventions are intertwined with those of the Dena’ina Athabascan people.
In 1968 Holt made her first trip to the desert in the American West with Michael Heizer and Robert Smithson, first arriving in Las Vegas and then traveling to Mono Lake in California. Holt described how, immediately on arriving, “the space, and the sky, and the sun just knocked me out. It was a very special experience where I felt that my inside and the outside were identical, somehow. I had been carrying this landscape within me, and suddenly there it was, without. When I came back to New York I was never the same person again.” She would continue across the next two decades to travel throughout the United States on road trips, using her camera to create visual poems from repeating observed occurrences.
In this series Holt is concerned with neglect and decay rather than the dreams of progress that became mythologized by the idea of the American West, which percolates through the art historical invention of “Land Art”—a term Holt herself did not use.
