This ground-breaking volume, beautiful companion book to the exhibition of the same name, is the first comprehensive study of Nancy Holt, the visionary American artist. Holt’s wide-ranging body of work beginning in the late 1960s includes land art—particularly the monumental Sun Tunnels (1973-1976)—major works of sculpture, installations, film, and video. Essays by a diverse and distinguished group of authors—including Lucy Lippard, Matthew Coolidge, and Pamela M. Lee—chart the artist’s fascinating trajectory and take us from her initial experiments with sound, light, and industrial materials to the culmination of her development of major site interventions and freestanding environmental sculpture. The book shows that as Holt’s interest in physical space matured, the geological variety and seeming boundlessness of the American landscape afforded her numerous opportunities to develop large-scale projects beyond the confines of New York City’s gallery walls. Including James Meyer’s valuable interview with Holt and rare, unpublished texts, photographs, and artworks, the volume expands our knowledge of this important artist and the crucial contexts in which she worked, along with her revolutionary concepts of space, time, optics, perspective, and more.

Alena Williams is an art historian and the curator of the Sightlines exhibition to open at the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University, in Fall 2010.

“A collection of essays that effectively broaden the scope of Holt’s traditional designation as a Land artist. . . . Handsomely illustrated.”—Women’s Art Journal

“This book provides ample basis to appreciate Holt’s distinctive contributions to historical land art and photographic media.”—Oxford Art Journal

“A long-overdue scholarly consideration of the oeuvre of one of the originators of land art. . . . Highly recommended.”—Choice

Exhibition Dates:
January 28-March 27, 2011, Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe, Germany

October 6-December 17, 2011, Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Chicago

January 19-April 1, 2012, Tufts University Art Gallery at the Aidekman Arts Center, Medford, Massachusetts

May 5-June 29, 2012, Santa Fe Arts Institute, Santa Fe

October 19, 2012-January 20, 2013, Utah Museum of Fine Arts, University of Utah, Salt Lake City