Background
Nancy Holt was born on April 5, 1938 in Worcester, Massachusetts, United States. An only child, she spent a great part of her childhood in New Jersey, where her father worked as a chemical engineer and her mother was a homemaker.
(This book evolved out of Holts earlier video tapes, books...)
This book evolved out of Holts earlier video tapes, books and her own interest, as a child, in Baseball and other sports.
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Nancy Holt was born on April 5, 1938 in Worcester, Massachusetts, United States. An only child, she spent a great part of her childhood in New Jersey, where her father worked as a chemical engineer and her mother was a homemaker.
Nancy Holt studied biology and graduated from Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts in 1960.
After graduation form the university, Holt served as assistant literary editor at Harper's Bazaar and taught at the Downtown Community School.
By the mid-1960s, Holt was immersed in the culture of two radical movements, Conceptual art and Minimalism. Her concrete poems and photographs of New Jersey sites during trips with Smithson and friends were vital additions to these movements.
In 1968, Holt visited the American West for the first time. She later recalled experiencing the desert and mountains, and on a vast scale unlike anything she had previously experienced, as a major turning point in her life and career. The next year, Holt and Smithson travelled to Europe to visit ancient archaeological sites in England, including Stonehenge and Dartmoor. These too influenced her perception of landscape.
Holt began her artistic career as a photographer and as a video artist. Holt's first solo exhibitions featuring these photographs took place in 1972 at the University of Montana, Rhode Island University, and at the Institute for Art and Urban Resources in New York City. 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.
In 1975, Holt moved to Utah for a year to complete the project "Sun Tunnels".
In the 1980s she began to create "functional" works that reflected growing environmental consciousness. Holt's explorations of water, electrical, and ventilation systems from these years focus on the limitations of the earth's natural resources. Besides, Holt contributed to various publications, which have featured both her written articles and photographs. She also authored several books.
In 1995 Holt left New York and settled in Galisteo, New Mexico, where she began exploring the high desert in Northern New Mexico. In 1999 Holt entered a period of introspection, meditation, and reading that removed her from the sphere of the art world, travelling to India and Nepal and returning to teach meditation in 2001. Moreover, Holt remained a writer and artist until the end of her life, creating public art works, installations, photographs, and films in the United States and abroad.
Nancy Holt died on February 8, 2014 at the age of 75 in New York City, United States.
Nancy Holt was most widely known for her large-scale environmental works "Sun Tunnels" and "Dark Star Park".
Her work has been exhibited internationally at major museums including the Hayward Gallery, London, Musee d’Art Modern de la Ville de Paris, Palais des Beaux Arts, Brussels, Kunsthallen Brandts, Centro de Cultura Contemporania, Barcelona, Tate Modern, London, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Hirschorn Museum, Washington, Whitney Museum, New York, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Her work is held in important public collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, MoMA, New York, Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City and the Museum fur Gegenswartkunst, Siegen.
Works by Holt are also permanently installed at the University of South Florida, Tampa; University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth; Rosslyn, Virginia; Miami University Art Musum, Ohio; Toronto, Ontario and in Avignon, France and Nokia, Finland, among others.
In 2013 Holt was presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award by the International Sculpture Center in New York.
(This book evolved out of Holts earlier video tapes, books...)
Three years after graduating, Nancy Holt married fellow environmental artist Robert Smithson in 1963. After Smithson’s death, Holt never remarried.
