Episode Details

TODAY on the GWA Podcast is curator and writer Lisa Le Feuvre, on the acclaimed land artist NANCY HOLT! The curator of over 75 exhibitions, including Casting a Glance: Dancing with Smithson at Marian Goodman Gallery, and Joan Jonas: An Island Departure at Farnsworth Art Museum among many others, Lisa Le Feuvre is also the executive director of the Holt Smithson Foundation, where she dedicates her work to the two pioneers of twentieth century art, hailed for their site specific interventions in the land – Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt, the latter of whom we are very excitedly discussing today. Born in 1938 in Massachusetts and raised in New Jersey, Holt worked for over five decades across poetry, photography, film, outdoor, public sculpture commissions, room-sized installations and more. Central to the group of artists living and working in New York City in the 1960s, Holt, with Smithson, ventured further afield to the great expansive desert of the American West, and it was here where she found her language. From her Sun Tunnel works, made up of concrete tubes, each oriented so that the sun pours through them on the summer and winter solstices, to Trail Markers, images that document her trails through the natural landscapes and ancient monuments of the UK. Holt, through her art, always thinks about how humans orient themselves or understand their place in the world, on both a macro and micro level. While she works with myriad materials, in a sense, her tools are light and space, language and the cosmos, as she consistently explores humanity's relationship to the earth. As she once said, “I feel the need to look at the sky, at the moon and the stars, is very basic, and it is inside all of us. So when I say my work is an exteriorization of my own inner reality, I mean, I am giving back to people through art what they already have in them.” And I can't wait to find out more. Nancy Holt at Goodwood Art Foundation, until 1 Nov: www.goodwoodartfoundation.org/art/nancy-holt-2026/ THIS EPISODE IS GENEROUSLY SUPPORTED BY THE LEVETT COLLECTION: www.famm.com/en/ www.instagram.com/famm_mougins // www.merrellpublishers.com/9781858947037 Follow us: Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel Sound editing by Tory Pope Co-produced with Molly Lafosse Music by Ben Wetherfield