Nancy holt artworks

Nancy Holt — was central to the earth, land and conceptual art movements as well as a pioneer of site-specific installation and experimental moving image.

Nancy holt, up and under

She recalibrated the limits of art, expanding the places where art could be found and embraced the new media of her time. Across five decades, she asked questions about how we might understand our place in the world, consistently investigating the relationships between perception, systems, and place. She graduated from Tufts University, where she majored in biology.

Numerous exhibitions, screenings, and commissions followed. From her earliest works Holt was attentive to language as a system structuring our understanding of place.

Nancy holt aware

In the ensuing years she extended her language explorations from the page to the landscape, as well as to photography, film, video, and audio. Holt extended this focus to trace in her artworks the systems of the stars, the functions of the built environment, and human mapping of landscape. Photography was an essential medium. Trail Markers and California Sun Signs use seriality to create visual poems, while Sunlight in Sun Tunnels and the Light and Shadow Photo Drawings turn to ever-shifting light cycles.

Drawing attention to visual perception and place, the Locators first focused on views from and in her studio, expanding into the landscape and, with the landmark Sun Tunnels —76 , to astronomical time. Perforations in the tunnels follow the constellations of Draco, Perseus, Columba, and Capricorn, allowing light projections to be cast inside.

Whether emanating from the stars or plugged to electricity grids, the perceptual qualities of light fascinated Holt. The room-sized installation Mirrors of Light —74 materializes light reflections and brings awareness to the body in space through the careful positioning of mirrors, a theatre spotlight, and the perceiver. Consistently she used drawing as a medium to think through and articulate sculptural thinking.