TRACES: Nancy Holt

Today is the occasion to bear in mind Nancy Holt (5/4/1938-8/2/2014), she is a pioneer and one of the few women artists involved in Land Art and Public Art. She is best known for her large-scale works, including “Sun Tunnels” in Northern Utah and “Dark Star Park” in Virginia. Also in the ‘70s, she made a series of pioneering film and video works. Holt’s early videos, explore perception and memory through experiments with point of view and process. Through documents or interviews, starting with: moments and memories, we reveal out from the past-unknown sides of big personalities, who left their indelible traces in time and history…

By Dimitris Lempesis

Nancy Holt was born in Worcester and grew up in New Jersey. Shortly after graduating from Tufts University in 1960 as a biologist, 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, she married Robert Smithson in 1963. Nancy Holt began her career as a photographer and video artist. In 1974, she collaborated 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. 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. Works like “Sun Tunnels” (1973–76), ” 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 and moonlight patterns), which transform specific geographic locations into vivid and resonant experiences. Her sculptural sites allow the viewer to channel the vastness of nature into human scale while creating a contemplative, subjective experience grounded in a specific location in real time. “Solar Rotary” is located in the campus of the University of South Florida in Tampa, Florida. The work, consists of 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. Holt wrote in 1977 about her magnum opus, “Sun Tunnels”, located in the Great Basin Desert of Utah: “I wanted to bring the vast space of the desert back to human scale. I had no desire to make a megalithic monument. The panoramic view of the landscape is too overwhelming to take in without visual reference points… through the tunnels, parts of the landscape are framed and come into focus… the works encloses surrounds…”.  Nancy Holt has also made a number of films and videos since the late ‘60s, including “Mono Lake” (1968), “East Coast, West Coast” (1969), “Swamp” (1971) and “Breaking ground: Broken Circle/Spiral Hill”  a video guided by Smithson’s film notes and drawings,  in 1978, she produced a 16mm color film documenting the seminal work “Sun Tunnels”.