2022 Research Fellow: Margo Handwerker

We are delighted to announce our second 2022 Holt/Smithson Foundation Research Fellowship awardee: Margo Handwerker. 

Margo Handwerker is Chief Curator and Director of the Texas State Galleries at Texas State University. Handwerker holds a Ph.D. from the School of Architecture at Princeton University and a Masters in Art History, Theory, and Criticism from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is a member of M12 STUDIO, a group of artists, researchers, and writers collectively based in Big Springs, Nebraska.

Handwerker’s Fellowship will expand on her doctoral dissertation “Art/Work: The Systems-Oriented Artist Expert, 1968–1984” by focusing on Robert Smithson’s 1972 proposal for Lake Edge Crescents in Ohio.

Robert Smithson, Lake Edge Crescents—Egypt Valley, Ohio—Strip Mine Reclamation Project (1972)

Graphite, paint overlay on aerial photograph

20 x 24 in. (50.8 x 61 cm)

Private collection

© Holt/Smithson Foundation / Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York

Archived News

Florida Friday Films

In May of 1971 Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt returned to Florida to visit the Florida Keys, with Smithson seeking potential locations for his Island Maze and Forking Island. While these hypothetical earthworks exist today solely through Smithson's drawings, on this trip Smithson did plant an earthwork he called Mangrove Ring—which is also the subject of a short film of the same name by Nancy Holt.