Nancy Holt facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Nancy Holt
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Nancy Holt visiting her work, Up and Under, in Hämeenkyrö municipality in Finland
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| Born | April 5, 1938 |
| Died | February 8, 2014 (aged 75) |
| Nationality | American |
| Known for | Sculpture, photography, film, writing |
| Movement | Environmental art and land art |
Nancy Holt (April 5, 1938 – February 8, 2014) was an American artist most known for her public sculpture, installation art, concrete poetry, and land art. Throughout her career, Holt also produced works in other media, including film and photography, and wrote books and articles about art.
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Biography
Nancy Holt was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1938. An only child, she spent a great deal of her childhood in New Jersey, where her father worked as a chemical engineer and her mother was a homemaker. She studied biology at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts.Nancy graduated in 1960 and went on a trip to Europe with her friends. Three years after graduating, she married fellow environmental artist Robert Smithson in 1963.
Holt began her artistic career as a photographer and as a video artist. In 1974, she collaborated with fellow artist Richard Serra on Boomerang, in which he videotaped her listening to her own voice echoing back into a pair of headphones after a time lag, as she described the disorienting experience.
Her involvement with photography and camera optics are thought to have influenced her later earthworks, which are "literally seeing devices, fixed points for tracking the positions of the sun, earth and stars." Today Holt is most widely known for her large-scale environmental works, Sun Tunnels and Dark Star Park. However, she created site and time-specific environmental works in public places all over the world. Holt contributed to various publications, which have featured both her written articles and photographs. She also authored several books. Holt received five National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, New York Creative Artist Fellowships, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Holt along with Beverly Pepper was a recipient of the International Sculpture Center's 2013 Lifetime Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award. From 1995 to 2013, she worked and resided in Galisteo, New Mexico.
In 2008 Holt helped rally opposition to a plan for exploratory drilling near the site of Smithson's Spiral Jetty at the Great Salt Lake in rural Utah. After Smithson's death, Holt never remarried. Holt died in New York City on February 8, 2014, at the age of 75.
Artistic style
The land art tradition
Holt is associated with earthworks or land art. Land art emerged in the 1960s, coinciding with a growing ecology movement in the United States, which asked people to become more aware of the negative impact they can have on the natural environment. Land art changed the way people thought of art; it took art out of the gallery or museum and into the natural landscape, the product of which were huge works engaging elements of the environment. Unlike much of the commercialized art during this time period, land art could not be bought or sold on the art market. Thus, it shifted the perspective of how people all over the world viewed art.
Land art was typically created in remote, uninhabited regions of the country, particularly the Southwest. Some attribute this popular location for land art to artists’ need to escape the turmoil in the United States during the 1960s and 70s by turning to the open, uncorrupted land of the West. Holt believed this artistic movement came about in the United States due to the vastness of the American landscape. As a result of earthworks not being easily accessible to the public, documentation in photographs, videos, drawings became imperative to their being seen. The first exhibit of contemporary land art was at the Virginia Dwan Gallery in New York in 1968. Other earth artists who emerged during this period include Robert Smithson, James Turrell, Walter De Maria, Michael Heizer, Dennis Oppenheim and Peter Hutchinson.
Perception of time and space
Holt's works of art often deal with issues of how people perceive time and space. The various monumental works she created blend with and complement their environment. Works such as Hydra’s Head do not merely sit in their environments, but are made of the land, stand on it and are created to be harmonious with the land. The pools in this work are at the top of concrete tubes imbedded in the ground. The land already at the site surrounds these pools. They reflect the natural landscape, while not disturbing it. Holt thought about human scale in relation to the works she created. People can interact with the works and become more aware of space, of their own visual perception, and of the order of the universe. Holt's works incorporate the passage of time and also function to keep time. For example, Annual Ring functions so that when sunlight falls through the hole in the dome and fits perfectly into a ring on the ground, it is solar noon on the summer solstice. At different times, the sun falls differently on the work and other holes in the dome align with celestial occurrences. Holt has said that she is concerned with making art that not only makes an impact visually, but is also functional and necessary in society, as seen in works like Sky Mound, which serves a dual function as a sculpture and park and it also generates alternative energy.
In her works, Holt created an intimate connection to nature and the stars, saying, "I feel that the need to look at the sky-at the moon and the stars-is very basic, and it is inside all of us. So when I say my work is an exteriorization of my own inner reality, I mean I am giving back to people through art what they already have in them."
Collaboration
Collaboration with architects, engineers, construction crews and the like is an essential part of creating land art. Solar Rotary is a work located on the campus of the University of South Florida in Tampa, Florida. The work, consists of 20 ft (6.1 m). aluminum poles topped with a swirl of metal called a shadow caster, which casts a circle of light on a central seat when it is solar noon on the day of the summer solstice. On five days a year at different times, the shadow caster is designed to create a circle of light around plaques placed in the ground that mark important events in Florida's history. Thus, for Solar Rotary, Holt employed Dr. Jack Robinson, an archaeo-astronomer and professor to help her, among other things, to plot the sun's coordinates for the work. For almost all of Holt's works, she worked with a collaborator and or collaborators. For Dark Star Park, Holt coordinated with developer J.W. Kaempfer, Jr., of the Kaempfer Company, in integrating the design of his adjacent building, Park Place Office Building into her design for the park. She also worked in collaboration with an architect, landscape architect, engineers, and real estate developers on the work. For Rock Rings, Holt searched far and wide to find the right masons to work on the piece and also had local stone called schist, which was 250-million-years old, quarried by hand for the work. Despite all of the collaboration, Holt noted that she was always present for the construction of her artworks. in June 2012, she completed Avignon Locators, her first site-specific work made in France on the basis of the Missoula Ranch Locators: Vision Encompassed (1972). This work involved a team of academics, teachers and students, an astrophysist, a surveyor, a metalworker and an architect.
Films
Holt has also made a number of films and videos since the late 1960s, including Mono Lake (1968) (also with artist Michael Heizer), East Coast, West Coast (1969), Swamp (1971) (in collaboration with her late husband Robert Smithson) and Breaking ground: Broken Circle/Spiral Hill, a video "guided by Smithson's film notes and drawings" and completed forty years on. Points of View: Clocktower (1974) features conversations between Lucy Lippard and Richard Serra, Liza Bear and Klaus Kertess, Carl Andre and Ruth Kligman and Bruce Brice and Tina Girouard. In 1978, she produced a 16mm color film documenting the seminal work Sun Tunnels.
Selected artworks
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- Missoula Ranch Locators: Vision Encompassed (1972, dismantled), Missoula, Montana
- Sun Tunnels (1973–1976), Great Basin Desert, Utah
- Hydra’s Head (1974), Artpark, Lewiston, New York
- Stone Enclosure: Rock Rings (1977–78), Western Washington University Public Sculpture Collection, Bellingham, Washington
- Rock Rings (1977–1978), Western Washington University, Bellingham, Washington
- 30 Below (1979), Lake Placid, New York
- Wild Spot (1979–1980), Wellesley College Botanic Gardens, Wellesley, Massachusetts
- Star-Crossed (1979–1981), Miami University, Oxford, Ohio
- Dark Star Park (1979–1984), Rosslyn, Virginia
- Annual Ring (1980–1981), Saginaw Valley State University, University Center, Michigan
- Time Span (1981), Laguna Gloria Art Museum, Austin, Texas
- Catch Basin (1982), St. James Park, Toronto, Canada
- Electrical System II (1982), Bellman Circuit, Toronto, Canada
- Sole Source (1983), Dublin, Ireland
- End of the Line/West Rock (1985), Southern Connecticut State University, New Haven, Connecticut
- Astral Grating (1987), Fulton Street/Broadway-Nassau Subway Station, New York. Commissioned by Metropolitan Transportation Authority Arts for Transit
- Skymound (1988–present), Hackensack, New Jersey
- Ventilation IV: Hampton Air (1992), Guild Hall, East Hampton, New York
- Solar Rotary (1995), University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida
- Up and Under (1998), Municipality of Hämeenkyrö, Finland
- Avignon Locators (2012), Sainte-Marthe Campus, Avignon, France (official sculpture and event Website): http://nancyholt.com
Exhibitions
The first retrospective of her work, “Nancy Holt: Sightlines,” opened in 2010 at the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University and traveled to several other venues in the United States and Europe.
Some of her work was included in the Light and Language exhibition at Lisemore Castle Arts, Ireland in 2021.
Selected solo exhibitions
- 1972 Art Gallery, University of Montana, Missoula Montana
- 1972 Art Center, University of Rhode Island, Kingston
- 1977 "Young American Filmmakers’ Series," Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York
- 1979 Rock Rings at Western Washington University
- 1985 Ace Gallery, Los Angeles, California
- 1989 Montpellier Cultural Arts Center, Laurel, Maryland
- 1993 John Weber Gallery, New York, New York
- 2010-13 "Nancy Holt: Sightlines" (international traveling exhibition), Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Gallery, New York, New York; Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe, Germany; Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Chicago, Illinois; Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts (e-press release); Santa Fe Art Institute (SFAI), Santa Fe, New Mexico; Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City, Utah
- 2012 "Nancy Holt: Photoworks," Haunch of Venison, London, United Kingdom
- 2013 "Nancy Holt: Land Art," Whitworth Art Gallery, University of Manchester, United Kingdom
- 2013 "Nancy Holt & Robert Smithson: England and Wales 1969," John Hansard Gallery, University of Southampton, United Kingdom
- 2013 "Nancy Holt – Selected Photo and Film Works," Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, Canada
Selected group exhibitions
- 1969 “Language III,” Dwan Gallery, New York, New York
- 1972 “International Art Exhibition,” Pamplona, Spain
- 1974 “Intervention in the Landscape,” Hayden Gallery, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge
- 1977 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York
- 1981 “Summer Light,” Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York
- 1983 “Monuments and Landscapes: The New Public Art,” McIntosh/Drysdale Gallery, Houston, Texas
- 1985 “Artist as Social Designer,” Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California
- 1989 “Making Their Mark,” Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, Ohio; New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, Louisiana; Denver Art Museum, Denver Colorado; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
- 1998 Wiener Kunstverein, Vienna, Austria
- 1999 “After Image: Drawing Through Process,” Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, California
- 2007 "Cosmologies," James Cohan Gallery, New York, New York
- 2012-13 "Ends of the Earth — Land Art to 1974," Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, California and Haus der Kunst, Munich
- 2013 "Light Show," Hayward Gallery, London, United Kingdom
- 2013 "The Whole Earth. California and the Disappearance of the Outside," Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Germany
Legacy
In 2014, the Holt/Smithson Foundation was founded to continue the creative and investigative spirit of the artists Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson, who, over their careers, developed innovative methods of exploring our relationship with the planet, and expanded the limits of artistic practice. Through public service, the Foundation engages in programs that increase awareness of both artists’ creative legacies, continuing the transformation they brought to the world of art and ideas.
Since 2021, Holt's estate has been represented by Sprüth Magers and Parafin.
See also
In Spanish: Nancy Holt para niños
