Press Release | Goodwood Art Foundation presents the first major UK exhibition of land artist Nancy Holt
Following its highly successful launch season, Goodwood Art Foundation will present a major exhibition dedicated to the celebrated American artist, Nancy Holt, opening on 2 May 2026. The artist’s first significant presentation in the UK, the exhibition forms part of the Foundation’s annual summer programme, spanning its two galleries and 70-acre landscape which features wooded glades, ancient woodland and meadowland.
Nancy Holt (1938-2014) was one of the few women central to the Land Art movement that emerged in the 1960s and is best known for her large-scale earthworks and site-specific installations. Her extensive output also encompassed concrete poetry, audio works, film and video, as well as photography and drawings. Goodwood Art Foundation’s presentation, which will extend beyond the gallery into the landscape, will explore Holt’s sustained inquiry into systems, time, space and location.
Nancy Holt’s integration of art and the natural environment resonates with the Foundation’s founding principles. Drawing from astronomy and geology, Holt expanded how art interacts with the landscape and anticipated ecological concerns in her work. Her practice linked human experience to larger natural and cosmic systems, often using sunlight, shadows and constellations to make viewers conscious of their position in space and time.
While Land Art surveys have long acknowledged Nancy Holt’s contribution to the field, her legacy has, until recently, received less institutional attention than her male counterparts, including Michael Heizer, Richard Long, Walter de Maria and her husband Robert Smithson. Several extensive exhibitions have taken place in the last years, the most recent in spring 2025 at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio, which received substantial acclaim. In 2018, the Dia Art Foundation acquired Sun Tunnels (1973-76) with support from Holt/Smithson Foundation, Holt’s iconic earthwork sited in the Great Basin Desert, Utah, which now forms one of its nine permanent sites.
Goodwood Art Foundation’s summer 2026 programme, presented in partnership with Rolls-Royce Motor Cars, will also feature a new selection of work by a roster of international contemporary artists across the 70-acre landscape and the Pigott Gallery. This will be announced in early 2026. Together the outdoor art series works in dialogue with the surrounding environment, reimagined and designed by Dan Pearson in 2025 to provide an ever-changing journey through art and nature.
The Foundation’s art programme is led by consultant curator Ann Gallagher, an independent curator working internationally with extensive experience, most recently working as Director of Collections, British Art, at Tate.
The Duke of Richmond and Gordon, CBE, DL, says: “Goodwood Art Foundation builds on a long history of engagement with art at Goodwood and is a vital part of its 21st century legacy. We have been thrilled by the incredible support that the Foundation’s inaugural season has received and look forward to sharing more of the very best international art in our stunning landscape in 2026. The Foundation is committed to fostering deeper relationships between people and the environment, and alongside an important learning programme, next year’s art programme promises to offer new ways to explore our landscape through art.”
Goodwood Art Foundation Director, Richard Grindy says “After the success of our inaugural season we are delighted to be presenting the first significant exhibition in the UK dedicated to the artist Nancy Holt. Featuring site-specific artwork that spans both our indoor and outdoor settings, this ambitious exhibition will showcase the range and depth of the groundbreaking artist’s practice. Holt’s dedication to creating art that encouraged people to think differently about their surroundings – and broader than that, their place in the world - resonates deeply with Goodwood Art Foundation’s values. We are so grateful to the Holt/Smithson Foundation for working with us on this project and to our consultant curator Ann Gallagher for bringing it to life.”
Rolls-Royce Motor Cars CEO, Chris Brownridge, says: “The Foundation and Rolls-Royce are rooted in Goodwood but have global significance - we both share the goals of inspiring greatness and nurturing talent in creativity. Since the successful inauguration of the Goodwood Art Foundation, we have witnessed how this cultural landscape and our partnership have flourished. We now look forward to the summer 2026 programme and how it will cultivate the imagination and inspire all who experience it.”
About Nancy Holt
Nancy Holt was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1938 and was raised in New Jersey. In 1960, she graduated from Tufts University. Shortly after, she moved to New York, where alongside a group of colleagues and collaborators including Michael Heizer, Carl Andre, Eva Hesse, Richard Serra and Robert Smithson — she began working in film, video, installation and sound art. With her novel use of cylindrical forms, light and techniques of reflection, Holt developed a unique aesthetics of perception, which enabled visitors to her sites to engage with the landscape in new and challenging ways.
Seminal works like Sun Tunnels (1973–76), Views Through a Sand Dune (1972), and her Locator series were responsive to their surroundings and the environment and offered novel means for observing natural phenomena, such as summer and winter solstices, and sun and moonlight patterns, which transform specific geographic locations into vivid and resonant experiences. While her contributions to Land Art have been widely recognised, her innovative work in film and video, landscape architecture and environmental ecology remain less examined.
Holt was the recipient of five National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, two New York Creative Artist Fellowships and a Guggenheim Fellowship, among other honours. Her work has been shown extensively including at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, Tate Modern in London, and is currently on show in major group exhibitions including at the Pinault Collection at the Bourse de Commerce in Paris and the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin.
About Holt/Smithson Foundation
Holt/Smithson Foundation became active in 2018 and develops the creative and critical legacies of the artists Nancy Holt (1938-2014) and her husband Robert Smithson (1938-1973). The founding director of the Foundation is Lisa Le Feuvre, ex Director of the Henry Moore Institute.
About Goodwood Art Foundation
Goodwood Art Foundation is a new not-for-profit destination for contemporary art in the UK, that opened in May 2025. Work by the very best international artists show in the galleries and across the 70-acre landscape which features wooded glades, wildflower meadows and ancient woodland.
Art, landscape and learning are the three pillars at the centre of the Foundation’s ethos. Its vision is to foster wellbeing, creativity and lifelong learning for all, through engagement with art and connection with nature. Situated on the Goodwood Estate in West Sussex, the Foundation builds on the Estate’s long history of supporting art and delivering world-class visitor experiences.
The Foundation’s art programme is led by consultant curator Ann Gallagher, previously Director of Collections, British Art, at Tate. The landscape, named Schwarzman Gardens, has been devised by renowned landscape designer Dan Pearson. A carefully structured creative learning programme with a focus on pupil mental health and wellbeing has been devised by Sally Bacon, a writer and consultant with a career in championing cultural learning across the education and arts sector.
Goodwood Art Foundation opened in May 2025 with an exhibition headlined by Rachel Whiteread and featuring work by Amie Siegel, Susan Phillipsz, Isamu Noguchi, Lubna Chowdhary, Rose Wylie and Veronica Ryan. The Foundation’s winter 2025 exhibition ERASURE features international artists Laís Amaral, Solange Pessoa and Dana Awartani, all of whom address the destruction of the environment and culture through their work. Now open, the exhibition runs until 12 April 2026.
Bolton & Quinn
Erica Bolton | erica@boltonquinn.com | +44 (0)20 7221 5000
Jane Quinn | jq@boltonquinn.com | +44 (0)20 7221 5000
Notes to Editors
Nancy Holt opens on 2 May 2026
Goodwood Art Foundation, New Barn Hill, Goodwood, Chichester, PO18 0QP
Find Goodwood Art Foundation on Instagram, Facebook and Linked In.
Opening Hours: Thursday – Monday, 9am – 5pm
Tickets £15, under 18s go free
Other concessions available
Image credit
Nancy Holt inside Sun Tunnels, Utah, 1976, Photograph Ardele Lister Artwork © Holt Smithson Foundation and Dia Art Foundation;
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