Nancy Holt
(1938-2014)
Born: Worcester, Massachusetts
Nancy Holt was an American artist most known for her public sculpture, installation art, concrete poetry, and land art. Throughout her career, Holt produced works in other media, including film and photography, and wrote books and articles about art. An innovator of site-specific installation and the moving image, Holt recalibrated the limits of art. She expanded the places where art could be found and embraced the new media of her time.
Three years after graduating from Tufts University, Holt met and married fellow environmental artist Robert Smithson in 1963. Throughout the 1960’s, Holt's early exhibitions were primarily in New York. Holt was attentive to language as a system structuring perception and understanding of place. By the mid-1960s she worked as an assistant literary editor at the magazine Harper’s Bazaar, and in 1966 began creating concrete poems and text-based works of art. She then moved to the American West to further expand her artistic influences, stating:
“As soon as I got to the desert, I connected with the place. Before that, the only other place that I had felt in touch within the same way was the Pine Barrens in southern New Jersey, which only begins to approach that kind of Western spaciousness.”
It was in the Great Basin Desert that Holt created one of her most widely known large-scale environmental works, Sun Tunnels (1973-76). This and other works such as Views Through a Sand Dune (1972), and her extensive Locator series provided a new lens for observing natural phenomena – such as summer and winter solstices and sun, moonlight, and constellation patterns, which transform specific geographic locations into vivid and resonant experiences.
Photography was also an essential medium for Holt, leading her to create “seeing devices” to draw attention to visual perception and place with her "Locator" series. The Locatorsfirst focused on views in, and from, her studio, expanding into the landscape with Missoula Ranch Locators: Vision Encompassed (1972). In turn, the Locators led to her earthworks Sun Tunnels and Hydra’s Head (1974), which “brought the stars down to earth.” [1]
By the 1980’s, Holt turned her attention to build environments using functional sculptural installations she termed "System Works". She utilized standard industrial materials designed for heating, ventilation, lighting, drainage – as well as fossil fuels and waste – the System Works are connected to internal architectural organs. Holt was known for using drawing as a medium to think through and articulate her sculptural thinking.
Holt has also authored several books throughout her career. For her profound impact on the art and culture of the 20th century, Holt was a recipient of the International Sculpture Center's 2013 Lifetime Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award. In 2014, Holt passed away in New York City on February 8, 2014 at the age of 75.