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, Sun Tunnels (1978)
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)
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.
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.
Nancy Holt, Views Through A Sand Dune (1972)
Recent exhibitions
In recent years, Holt’s work has received increasing institutional attention. Her retrospective Sightlines (2012–13) helped to re-establish her central role within the history of Land art. In 2018, the Dia Art Foundation acquired Sun Tunnels, marking the first work by a female Land artist to enter its collection, alongside a significant group of her gallery-based works, followed by a major exhibition in 2018–19. The most comprehensive exhibition of Holt’s work to date opened in spring 2025 at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio.
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 UK exhibition to date.
