Nancy Holt, Electrical System (1982)
Installation view: UMass Dartmouth, Massachusetts, 2021
3/4 in. steel conduit, lighting and electrical fixtures, light bulbs, electrical wire
Overall dimensions variable
Photograph: Chris Diani

Nancy Holt's Electrical system is a network of arching conduit and lightbulbs

Nancy Holt, Electrical Lighting for Reading Room (1985)
Installation view: Artist as Social Designer: Aspects of Public Urban Art Today, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1985
Electrical conduit, electrical wire light bulbs, chains, steel cages
16 x 24 x 12 ft. (4.88 x 7.32 x 3.66 m)

Nancy Holt's sculpture Electrical Lighting for Reading Room made of lightbulbs and conduit along three walls

Nancy Holt, Electrical Lighting for Reading Room [detail] (1985)
Installation view: Artist as Social Designer: Aspects of Public Urban Art Today, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1985
Electrical conduit, electrical wire light bulbs, chains, steel cages
16 x 24 x 12 ft. (4.88 x 7.32 x 3.66 m)

Tuesday Texts

Research Fellowships

Robert Smithson sitting on the edge of Spiral Jetty

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.

A tool for researchers at all stages, our Scholarly Text Program invites thinkers from a range of disciplines to write 1,200 words on a work by Holt and/or Smithson that is necessary and urgent for today. The authors explore how Holt and Smithson’s ideas resonate through artistic and cultural production in the present, exploring topics ranging from geology to ecology, poetry, architecture, science fiction, public art, sculpture, drawing, film, exhibition histories, philosophy, and all the stops between. The Scholarly Text Program will publish two essays on each work, presenting differing opinions and approaches. Each essay includes images selected by the author, a short bibliography, citation reference, and endnotes pointing to the author’s references.

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Related Content

a person sitting on the ground reading with their back against a dark wall and a pile of books sitting on either side of them

Tuesday Texts Program

July 9, 2020

Holt/Smithson Foundation is committed to developing new research on the work and creative legacies of artists Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson. In June we launch our on-going Scholarly Text Program, which invites thinkers to focus on a single artwork by Holt and/or Smithson.

two people site at a diner table looking forward, one smokes a cigarette. black and white.

Chapter Two of Tuesday Texts

January 6, 2021

We are delighted to announce that throughout January and February we will be publishing a second chapter of our Tuesday Text Series as part of our ongoing Scholarly Text Program, which invites thinkers to focus on a single artwork by Holt and/or Smithson.

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

Tuesday Texts: Chapter Three

February 11, 2022

We are delighted to announce that throughout February we will be publishing a third chapter of our Tuesday Text Series as part of our ongoing Scholarly Text Program, which invites thinkers to focus on a single artwork by Holt and/or Smithson.

Every Tuesday we will publish a text to our website that includes images selected by the author, a short bibliography, citation reference, and endnotes pointing to the author’s references.

a yellow front loader on top of a ramp of red earth

Nancy Holt Interviews at Amarillo Ramp

Nancy Holt conducted interviews with two individuals that helped to create Robert Smithson's Amarillo Ramp shortly after its completion in 1973.

Robert Smithson Interview with Stig Broegger and Erik Thygesen

During an extensive trip to the U.S. in 1969, artist Stig Broegger and journalist and author Erik Thygesen sought out Robert Smithson in the Greenwich Village loft he shared with Nancy Holt for a conversation on Environmental Art and the role of art and artists in society. Already in 1967-1968, Broegger and Thygesen had translated writings by Smithson as co–editors of ‘ta, a Danish avantgarde magazine introducing new paradigms like ecology, cybernetics, and minimal, post-minimal and conceptual art practices to a Scandinavian audience. The two recalled the amount of glass and piles of rocks in the Holt Smithson loft.