Nancy Holt (1938 – 2014)
MoonSunStarEarthSkyWater | 2 May - 1 November 2026
Nancy Holt (1938–2014) was a central figure in the earth, land, and conceptual art movements, and a major innovator of site-specific installation and experimental moving image. Over five decades, her work explored our relationship to the world, examining perception, systems, and place. Holt’s multidisciplinary practice encompassed concrete poetry, audio works, film and video, photography, drawings, room-sized installations, earthworks, and public sculpture.
Nancy Holt standing inside Sun Tunnels in Utah's Great Basin Desert, 1976. Photograph: Ardele Lister. Artwork © Holt/Smithson Foundation and Dia Art Foundation / Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York.
Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, and raised in New Jersey, Holt earned a degree in Biology from Tufts University in 1960 before moving to New York. There, she became part of a close network of artists including Michael Heizer, Carl Andre, Eva Hesse, Richard Serra, and Robert Smithson, her husband. Embracing the emerging media of her time, Holt consistently questioned how and where art could be experienced.
Nancy Holt, Mirrors of Light II (1974). Photograph: John R. Bayalis © Holt/Smithson Foundation / Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York.
Practice and Key Works
Expanding beyond the confines of the gallery, Holt developed a distinctive sculptural language through her use of cylindrical forms, light, reflection, and framing devices. Her works attend to what she described as the ‘concretisation of perception’, foregrounding the act of seeing as an embodied and spatial experience. Major works such as Sun Tunnels (1973–76), Views Through a Sand Dune (1972), and her extensive Locator series respond directly to their environments, offering new ways of observing natural phenomena including solstices and patterns of sun and moonlight. Through these works, Holt transformed specific geographic locations into vivid and resonant sites of encounter.
Nancy Holt, Hydra's Head (1974). Concrete, earth, water. Along the Niagara River, Artpark, Lewiston, New York. © Holt/Smithson Foundation / Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York.
While Holt’s work has frequently appeared in surveys of Land art, her sustained contributions to film and video, landscape architecture, and environmental ecology have remained comparatively underexamined. Across these mediums, she pursued a consistent inquiry into systems, language, light, time, space and location.
Recent exhibitions
In recent years, Holt’s work has received increasing institutional attention, with major solo exhibitions presented at leading museums. In 2025, the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio presented Nancy Holt: Power Systems, focusing on her exploration of systems; in 2024, the Gropius Bau in Berlin presented Nancy Holt: Circles of Light; and in 2022, Bildmuseet in Sweden presented Nancy Holt / Inside Outside, which travelled to MACBA, Spain, in 2023. In the US, Holt’s work is held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and Dia Art Foundation, which acquired Sun Tunnels in 2020 with the support of Holt/Smithson Foundation, marking the first work by a female land artist to enter its collection.
Despite this growing recognition, Holt has not previously been the subject of a major presentation in the UK. Her exhibition at Goodwood Art Foundation marks her first and most substantial presentation in the UK to date.
