Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson seated on chairs in their NYC loft

First Annual Holt/Smithson Foundation Lecture

We are very pleased to announce the first in a ten-year series of Annual Lectures, a new Holt/Smithson Foundation program that invites artists, writers, and thinkers to extend the creative legacies of Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson.

Over the 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 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.

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.  The third Annual Lecture will take place at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts (UMFA), Salt Lake City, and the further eight lectures in this roaming series will continue through to 2032.

New York, New Mexico, and Utah were important locations for Holt and Smithson. From 1963 they lived together in the West Village in New York City, just a few blocks from the Whitney; from 1995 Holt lived in Galisteo, New Mexico; and Utah is the location of the landmark earthworks Sun Tunnels (1973-76) and Spiral Jetty (1970).

Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson in their Greenwich Street loft, New York City, 1970
Photograph: Gianfranco Gorgoni

Archived News

a large barrel of glue overturned on top of a muddy hill

2022 Research Fellowship Applications Now Open

We are calling for applications to our 2022 Research Fellowships. This program encourages new research on the work, ideas, and creative legacies of Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson. Our second Fellowship season focuses on two topics: Earthwork Ethics and Local Narratives, with each Fellowship based around a specific research project.

A figure standing in a white walled room. A diagonal line of mirrors in a white walled room. Light is reflecting off the mirrors, creating orbs of light on the other two walls

Upcoming Exhibition: Nancy Holt "Mirrors of Light" at Sprüth Magers, Berlin

Holt/Smithson Foundation, Monika Sprüth, and Philomene Magers are delighted to announce Nancy Holt’s (1938– 2014) first solo exhibition at the Berlin gallery. Mirrors of Light presents the room-scale installation with the same title, a work from 1973/74 that is crucial to understanding Holt’s notion of perceptual experience. Holt’s practice navigates the complexities of light as artistic medium, physical reality, and aesthetic concept. It is an architectonic structure that channels projected light into a complex spatial experience.