Following its highly successful launch season, Goodwood Art Foundation will present a major exhibition dedicated to the celebrated American artist, Nancy Holt, opening on 2nd May 2026. The artist’s first significant presentation in the UK, the exhibition forms part of the Foundation’s annual summer programme, spanning its two galleries and 70-acre landscape which features wooded glades, ancient woodland and meadowland.
Nancy Holt (1938-2014) was one of the few women central to the Land Art movement that emerged in the 1960s and is best known for her large-scale earthworks and site-specific installations. Her extensive output also encompassed concrete poetry, audio works, film and video, as well as photography and drawings. Goodwood Art Foundation’s presentation, which will extend beyond the gallery into the landscape, will explore Holt’s sustained inquiry into systems, time, space and location.
Nancy Holt’s integration of art and the natural environment resonates with the Foundation’s founding principles. Drawing from astronomy and geology, Holt expanded how art interacts with the landscape and anticipated ecological concerns in her work. Her practice linked human experience to larger natural and cosmic systems, often using sunlight, shadows and constellations to make viewers conscious of their position in space and time.
While Land Art surveys have long acknowledged Nancy Holt’s contribution to the field, her legacy has, until recently, received less institutional attention than her male counterparts, including Michael Heizer, Richard Long, Walter de Maria and her husband Robert Smithson. Several extensive exhibitions have taken place in the last years, the most recent in spring 2025 at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio, which received substantial acclaim. In 2018, the Dia Art Foundation acquired Sun Tunnels (1973-76) with support from Holt/Smithson Foundation, Holt’s iconic earthwork sited in the Great Basin Desert, Utah, which now forms one of its nine permanent sites.
The Foundation’s art programme is led by consultant curator Ann Gallagher, an independent curator working internationally with extensive experience, most recently working as Director of Collections, British Art, at Tate.
The Duke of Richmond and Gordon, CBE, DL, said:
“Goodwood Art Foundation builds on a long history of engagement with art at Goodwood and is a vital part of its 21st century legacy. We have been thrilled by the incredible support that the Foundation’s inaugural season has received and look forward to sharing more of the very best international art in our stunning landscape in 2026. The Foundation is committed to fostering deeper relationships between people and the environment, and alongside an important learning programme, next year’s art programme promises to offer new ways to explore our landscape through art.”
Goodwood Art Foundation Director, Richard Grindy, said:
“After the success of our inaugural season we are delighted to be presenting the first significant exhibition in the UK dedicated to the artist Nancy Holt. Featuring site-specific artwork that spans both our indoor and outdoor settings, this ambitious exhibition will showcase the range and depth of the groundbreaking artist’s practice. Holt’s dedication to creating art that encouraged people to think differently about their surroundings – and broader than that, their place in the world – resonates deeply with Goodwood Art Foundation’s values. We are so grateful to the Holt/Smithson Foundation for working with us on this project and to our consultant curator Ann Gallagher for bringing it to life.”
Nancy Holt opens on 2nd May 2026
Goodwood Art Foundation
About the artist
Nancy Holt was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1938 and was raised in New Jersey. In 1960, she graduated from Tufts University. Shortly after, she moved to New York, where alongside a group of colleagues and collaborators including Michael Heizer, Carl Andre, Eva Hesse, Richard Serra and Robert Smithson — she began working in film, video, installation and sound art. With her novel use of cylindrical forms, light and techniques of reflection, Holt developed a unique aesthetics of perception, which enabled visitors to her sites to engage with the landscape in new and challenging ways.
Seminal works like Sun Tunnels (1973–76), Views Through a Sand Dune (1972), and her Locator series were responsive to their surroundings and the environment and offered novel means for observing natural phenomena, such as summer and winter solstices, and sun and moonlight patterns, which transform specific geographic locations into vivid and resonant experiences. While her contributions to Land Art have been widely recognised, her innovative work in film and video, landscape architecture and environmental ecology remain less examined.
Holt was the recipient of five National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, two New York Creative Artist Fellowships and a Guggenheim Fellowship, among other honours. Her work has been shown extensively including at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, Tate Modern in London, and is currently on show in major group exhibitions including at the Pinault Collection at the Bourse de Commerce in Paris and the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin.
About Holt/Smithson Foundation
Holt/Smithson Foundation became active in 2018 and develops the creative and critical legacies of the artists Nancy Holt (1938-2014) and her husband Robert Smithson (1938-1973). The founding director of the Foundation is Lisa Le Feuvre, ex Director of the Henry Moore Institute. @holtsmithsonfoundation
