The pioneering earthworks artist Nancy Holt was born in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1938. Although she is best known for her large-scale sculptural works, including Sun Tunnels (1979) in the Great Basin Desert, Utah; Dark Star Park (1984) in Arlington, Virginia; and Up and Under (1998) in Nokia, Finland. Holt also worked in film, video, and photography for more than three decades.
Throughout the 1970s, Holt made experimental films and videos that explored memory and perception of time and space. Frequently made in collaboration with her husband, the artist Robert Smithson, these works are now considered to be some of the most iconic of the medium. Holt received five National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and exhibited internationally at venues such as the Hayward Gallery in London; the Palais des Beaux Arts in Brussels; the Tate Modern in London; the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art; the Hirschorn Museum in Washington, DC; and at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Her 2010 retrospective exhibition Nancy Holt: Sightlines traveled from Columbia University’s Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery in New York to the Badischer Kunstverein in Karlsruhe, Germany; the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts in Chicago; the Tufts University Art Gallery in Medford, MA; the Santa Fe Art Institute; and the Utah Museum of Fine Arts in Salt Lake City. She lived and worked in Galisteo, New Mexico for many years and died in New York in 2014.
