Nancy Holt ─ Sightlines

Alena J. Williams with contributions by Pamela M. Lee, Lucy R. Lippard, Nancy Holt, Ines Schaber, Matthew Coolidge, James Meyer, and Julia Alderson

This is the first retrospective study of Nancy Holt, the visionary American artist---a landmark companion book to the "Nancy Holt: Sightlines" exhibition. Holt's wide-ranging body of work since the late 1960s includes Land art---particularly the monumental Sun Tunnels (1973-76), major works of sculpture, installations, photography, film, and video. A comprehensive representation of her working process in both word and image, this book illuminates Holt's interest in physical space and reveals how the geographic variety and boundlessness of the American landscape afforded the artist numerous opportunities to develop large-scale projects beyond the confines of New York City's gallery walls. Essays by a diverse and distinguished group of contributors---including Pamela M. Lee, Lucy R. Lippard, Ines Schaber, and Matthew Coolidge---chart Holt's artistic trajectory from her initial explorations of sound, light, and industrial materials to major site interventions and environmental sculpture. James Meyer's valuable interview with `Holt and Julia Alderson's illustrated chronology expand our knowledge of this groundbreaking artist and the crucial contexts in which she worked. More than twenty original writings by the artist and a rare selection of her concrete poetry, documentary photographs, and preparatory drawings reveal Holt's revolutionary concepts of space, time, optics, and scale.

Alena J. Williams is a doctoral candidate in modern and contemporary art in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University in New York. She is the curator of the traveling exhibition "Nancy Holt: Sightlines" on the artist's Land art, films, video, and related works from 1966 to 1980, organized for the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University. She received her Bachelor of Arts in fine arts from Harvard University and her Master of Arts and Master of Philosophy in art history from Columbia University. Williams has contributed essays to publications at the Guggenheim Museum, Ars Electronica, and the Studio Museum in Harlem, among others. She recently published Light Is a Kind of Rhythm, an experimental book on abstract cinema.