The Wexner Center for the Arts presents Nancy Holt: Power Systems as Part of its Spring 2025 Exhibitions program

Exhibition Details

The Wexner Center currently offers a prelude to Holt’s gallery exhibition, an installation of her 1986 System Works sculpture Pipeline, in the center’s lobby and adjacent outdoor areas.

Pipeline calls attention to the physical and economic systems powering buildings and to the impact of fossil fuel extraction. Holt visited Alaska in March of 1986 at the invitation of the Visual Arts Center of Alaska in Anchorage, who hoped she might create a work of art in celebration of the region’s beauty. Holt was instead struck by the infiltration of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System through the Alaskan landscape. Pipeline was her response.

The presentation of Nancy Holt: Power Systems in the galleries highlights her consistent attention to literal and metaphorical flows of power.

“When we’re in a building, we often ignore the systems around us,” notes Lisa Le Feuvre, executive director of Holt/Smithson Foundation and the curator of Power Systems. "Nancy Holt observed that the lighting systems light. The heating systems bring warmth into the building. The ventilation system makes the building breathe. What you’ll see in this exhibition is a laser-focused study of these bodies of work. So, when you come into the galleries, you will literally feel a heating system inside the galleries. You will literally stand within a fountain of light that connects the electricity that really guides our time in architecture to what we see in the galleries.”

The exhibition features the first posthumous presentation of Heating System (1984), a room-sized sculpture that exposes heating infrastructure. Steel pipes loop around the exhibition space, punctuated by gauges and radiators, with a valve wheel at the structure’s center. Inside the exhibition space, a device on the wall records changes in temperature and humidity in red and blue ink on a piece of graph paper. In a 2013 interview in Sculpture magazine, Holt observed, “the sculpture produced its own drawing, which I thought was an interesting idea.”

Nancy Holt: Power Systems also includes previously unexhibited works on paper revealing her continuous practice of drawing and showing her ideas for both realized and unrealized System Works.

Nancy Holt trained as a biologist and made her first artworks in 1966. Her earliest output utilized the written and spoken word, exploring language as a system structuring perception and understanding of place. Holt’s interest in the system of language led her to explore the productive miscommunications that take place when information is imperfectly transferred from one medium to another. The video sculpture Points of View (1974) reveals, as she notes in her journal, “the wonder of place through verbal description.” Four monitors show views of Lower Manhattan with each accompanied by a dialogue that literally and conceptually demonstrates different points of view.

Two years after making her first artwork, Holt started to explore photography during her travels. In Holt’s photographic series Texas Claims (1969), the earliest work in the exhibition, she charts the marking of private property and nature’s refusal of borders. In Time Outs (1985) she presents 32 photographs of football games being broadcast on television. Like all games, football is played within a system of rules and actions marked out in space, and its live action is beamed into homes and public places across the globe. Holt’s artistic practice is rooted in conceptual art, which—like football—is based in distributed systems.

Nancy Holt: Power Systems also features the film Sun Tunnels (1978), a work that shows the making of the landmark earthwork of the same name that locates the celestial system of the sun and the stars on the earth, and the feature length vide0 Revolve (1977), an evocative meditation on illness biologically possessing the body. 

Nancy Holt: Power Systems is curated by Lisa Le Feuvre, executive director of Holt/Smithson Foundation, and developed in partnership with Holt/Smithson Foundation.

About the Artist

Nancy Holt (1938–2014) was a member of the earth, land, and conceptual art movements. An innovator of site-specific installation and the moving image, Holt recalibrated the limits of art. She expanded the places where art could be found and embraced the new media of her time. Across five decades she asked questions about how we might understand our place in the world, investigating perception, systems, and place.

Holt’s rich artistic output spans concrete poetry, audio works, film and video, photography, ephemeral gestures, drawings, room-sized installations, earthworks, artists’ books, and public sculpture commissions. After graduating with a degree in biology from Tufts University, Holt made her first artwork in 1966 while living in New York City as part of the conceptual art scene, and right from the start she was aware that as a female artist she would be significantly less visible than her male peers. More information is available from Holt/Smithson Foundation.

About the Curator

Lisa Le Feuvre is a curator, writer, and editor. She is the inaugural executive director of Holt/Smithson Foundation, the artist-endowed foundation dedicated to the creative legacies of Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson. Between 2010 and 2017, Le Feuvre was Head of Sculpture Studies at the Henry Moore Institute, directing the research component of the largest artist-endowed foundation in Europe, leading programs of education, research, collections, publications, and exhibitions focused on sculptural thinking. She has curated more than 70 exhibitions as an institutional and independent curator, played a pivotal role in shaping academic and arts organizations, edited over 30 books and journals, spoken at museums and universities across the world, and has published more than 100 essays and interviews with artists.