In the vast expanse of the Great Basin Desert, where horizon and sky seem to merge into an infinite continuum, the act of seeing becomes an art form in itself. Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels (1973 – 1976) is less an object to be observed than an experience to be inhabited – a meditation on light, scale, and temporality that dissolves the boundary between the human and the cosmic. The work, monumental yet intimate, situates perception as both subject and medium, asking viewers to reconcile the fleeting present with the immensity of celestial time. In a contemporary art landscape often dominated by urban spectacle, Holt’s desert installation offers a radical recalibration, reminding us that art can be as much a vessel for contemplation as it is a site for formal innovation. Her practice, spanning environmental sculpture, experimental film, photography and public art, interrogates the interplay of vision, site and time, inviting audiences to attune themselves to phenomena that are ordinarily peripheral, unnoticed or invisible.
Echoes & Evolutions: Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels at Sprüth Magers, New York – the gallery’s first solo exhibition of the artist – delves into the meticulous thought processes behind this iconic earthwork. Born in 1938, Holt emerged during an era in which conceptualism, minimalism and land art intersected, yet she distinguished herself by privileging human perception as a lens for understanding space. Educated at Tufts University and the University of New Mexico, and later an influential participant in the downtown New York art scene, she collaborated with contemporaries such as Robert Smithson, yet her work retains a distinct poetic rigor and observational clarity. Holt’s installations, films, and photographic projects reflect a consistent preoccupation with framing – whether literal or conceptual – underscoring how human vision can be directed, interrupted and expanded.
Recent exhibitions reaffirm Holt’s enduring relevance. Solo shows at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus (2025), and the Art Institute of Chicago (2025), along with the touring presentation from Bildmuseet, Umeå to MACBA, Barcelona (2022 – 2023), have spotlighted her systemic approach to environmental and sculptural practice. Group exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2024), and the Maxxi Museum, Rome (2025), have positioned her work in dialogue with the contemporary moment, highlighting her prescient concerns with ecology, site-specificity and the temporality of experience. Yet, Sun Tunnels remains perhaps the most emblematic manifestation of her artistic philosophy, a locus where light, landscape and cosmic orientation converge.
The exhibition at Sprüth Magers presents a rare opportunity to engage with the genesis of Holt’s ideas through previously unseen drawings, collages, photographs, and two Studio Locators, her early sculptural devices for focusing vision. Developed over three years, Sun Tunnels comprises four concrete cylinders arranged in an X-formation, precisely sited to align with the rising and setting sun at the solstices. Circular apertures puncture each tunnel, projecting star constellations into the interiors, with Holt noting that “with those criteria there were only a few constellations that I could use, and from them I chose Draco, Perseus, Columba and Capricorn,” a selection she described as encompassing the globe and allowing viewers to experience both hemispheres of the sky. This interplay of natural light and architectural form renders the tunnels simultaneously terrestrial and celestial.
The exhibition foregrounds Holt’s laborious process. Photographic studies document her use of cardboard tubes to model configurations, testing light, scale, and the projection of star patterns, with annotations noting orientation, time, and celestial alignment. Works such as Sunlight in Sun Tunnels and Sun Tunnels: Shifting Shadows chart light and shadow across a single day, underscoring the artist’s systemic engagement with temporal phenomena. Similarly, her Studio Locators, simple steel-pipe structures mounted at eye level, reveal a continuous curiosity about framing and perception, functioning as telescopes without lenses that encourage viewers to interrogate overlooked details of the built environment, with the Locators themselves described as devices “framing a particular field of vision in space.” Holt’s rigorous attentiveness to vision, both in these early works and in the monumental Sun Tunnels, highlights the conceptual thread running through her career, and through this expansive series, “patterns in her practice emerge that illustrate her systematic approach to making sculpture.”
Holt’s preoccupations resonate with several contemporary artists exploring perception, site, and temporality. Olafur Eliasson, whose light- and environment-based installations interrogate perception in relation to natural phenomena, parallels Holt’s work in his interest in the experiential dynamics of viewing. Maya Lin, whose earthworks and memorials manipulate landscape to elicit reflection and awareness, similarly extends Holt’s concern with the integration of human experience and environment. Finally, Richard Long’s walk-based sculptures, wherein natural gestures are inscribed into the landscape, echo Holt’s meditations on time, movement and orientation within space. Each artist engages with the phenomenological dimensions Holt pioneered, creating a lineage of contemporary practice.
Returning to the exhibition’s wider implications, Echoes & Evolutions underscores the continued relevance of Holt’s work in a moment defined by ecological urgency and a reappraisal of our relationship with the natural world. In an era dominated by virtuality and urban density, Sun Tunnels and its associated studies remind viewers of the profound perceptual shifts achievable through attentiveness to light, shadow, and celestial rhythm. Holt’s insistence on rigorous calculation, meticulous observation, and poetic framing suggests an art that privileges both the intellect and imagination, bridging the empirical and mystical.
In presenting these rarely seen drawings and photographic studies alongside the Studio Locators, Sprüth Magers situates Sun Tunnels not merely as an isolated monumental work but as the culmination of a sustained, systematic inquiry into vision, time, and site. The exhibition thus illuminates Holt’s broader practice while emphasizing the intellectual and sensory rigor embedded in a work that continues to inspire and challenge audiences. It is a reminder that art’s power often lies in its capacity to recalibrate perception, foster attentiveness and offer a means of experiencing the world that is at once intimate, expansive, and enduring. Echoes & Evolutions is more than a retrospective – it is an invitation to inhabit the cosmos through the careful, considered lens of one of the 20th century’s most insightful and innovative artists.
Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels, with its meticulous choreography of light and landscape, endures as an exemplar of environmental sculpture and site-responsive practice. By foregrounding the processes that underlie its creation and situating it within a constellation of contemporary practices, this exhibition not only celebrates Holt’s legacy but affirms the ongoing necessity of work that challenges perception, expands spatial awareness, and reconnects viewers to the rhythms of the natural and celestial worlds. In this context, Echoes & Evolutions is essential viewing – a timely reminder of the ways in which art can transform not only our understanding of space but also the way we inhabit it.
Echoes & Evolutions: Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels is at Sprüth Magers, New York until 25 October: spruethmagers.com
Words: Shirley Stevenson
Image Credits:
1&5. Nancy Holt © Holt/Smithson Foundation, Licensed by VAGA at ARS, New York. Courtesy Sprüth Magers. Photo: Ardele Lister.
2. Nancy Holt during the construction of Sun Tunnels in Utah’s Great Basin Desert in 1976. The sculpture Sun Tunnels is in the collection of Dia Art Foundation, with support from Holt/Smithson Foundation © Holt/Smithson Foundation / Licensed by Artists Rights. Society, New York. Courtesy Sprüth Magers.
3. Nancy Holt, Sunlight in Sun Tunnels, 1976. Inkjet print on archival rag paper; composite made by the
artist from original 35 mm transparencies. 127.3 x 158.8 cm | 50 1/8 x 62 1/2 inches, 129.5 x 158.8 cm | 51 x 62 1/2 inches (framed) © Holt/Smithson Foundation, Licensed by VAGA at ARS, New York, Courtesy Sprüth Magers.
4. Nancy Holt, Sun Tunnels photo study collage: “SE-NW”, ca. 1975. Photo collage, graphite pencil, and tape on paper 22.9 x 30.5 cm | 9 x 12 inches © Holt/Smithson Foundation, Licensed by VAGA at ARS, New York, Courtesy Sprüth Magers.
