Nancy Holt's Land Art Lands In The UK The Art Newspaper International Art News And Events

Nancy Holt's work has long occupied a singular place in Land Art: precise, atmospheric, and less interested in spectacle than in perception itself. Now, for the first time, the American artist is the subject of a major UK exhibition, at Goodwood Art Foundation just outside Chichester, West Sussex, where her outdoor works are being shown alongside drawings, photography, and concrete poetry.

The exhibition includes the first posthumous installation of Hydra's Head, an earthwork made of six pools of water positioned according to the Hydra constellation. Installed in Goodwood's chalk quarry, it was placed according to instructions Holt left behind, curator Ann Gallagher said. Gallagher, who knew Holt during the final decade of her life, also oversaw the presentation of Ventilation System (1985-92), which begins inside the gallery and extends beyond the building into the surrounding landscape.

Holt (1938-2014) came to large-scale art by an unusual route. She studied biology at Tufts University in Massachusetts and worked as a sub editor at Harper's Bazaar in the 1960s before moving into concrete poetry and then into works that linked earth, sky, and systems of measurement. The exhibition title, Nancy Holt: MoonSunStarEarthSkyWater, comes from one of her poems.

Not every major work could be included. Sun Tunnels (1973-76), Holt's best-known outdoor piece, is permanently sited in the Utah desert and owned by Dia Art Foundation, which describes it as the organization's first outdoor work by a woman. In Sussex, it appears as a film of its making, a reminder that Holt's practice often depended as much on framing and sequence as on scale.

The exhibition also reflects the institutional network now surrounding Holt's legacy. Gallagher and Goodwood Art Foundation worked closely with the Holt/Smithson Foundation, which Holt founded in 2018 to preserve and extend the creative legacies of herself and Robert Smithson. The foundation oversees research, exhibitions, publications, events, and both artists' collections.

That context matters. Holt's work emerged from the same 1960s and 1970s American Land Art milieu as Smithson, Michael Heizer, Walter De Maria, Sol LeWitt, and Carl Andre, but her approach was distinct: less bombastic, more attuned to the way a viewer's body registers place. At Goodwood, that sensitivity is sharpened by the quarry setting itself. The result is not simply a survey, but a reactivation of Holt's central question: how do we see the landscape, and how does it see us back?

MENAFN01052026005694012507ID1111059693