“Nancy Holt: Power Systems” at Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus

The multidisciplinary arts center at The Ohio State University has partnered with Holt/Smithson Foundation for the most extensive inquiry to date into the artist’s focus on the systems that connect and power societies.

Holt (1938–2014) rethought the possibilities of what art can be and where it can be found. Over five decades, she addressed the ways that often invisible systems around us impact how we think about our place in the world.

“Power Systems” focuses on her System Works–interactive, site-responsive sculptural installations created with standard industrial materials that reveal the means devised to move air, heat, light, and energy through the built environment.

In 1992 Holt noted how “these technological systems have become necessary for our everyday existence, yet they are usually hidden behind walls or beneath the earth and relegated to the realm of the unconscious. We have trouble owning up to our almost total dependence on them.”

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 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 Hot Water Heat (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.

Visitors are invited to turn this wheel, giving them control over the flow of hot water through the pipes and thus the room’s temperature. 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.

Holt’s earliest output utilized the written and spoken word, exploring language as a system structuring perception and understanding of place. She used standard office technology—the tape recorder, the fax machine, and the photocopier—to execute and distribute her works on paper, reprographic tools that were the new media of her time.

Two years after making her first artwork, she started to explore photography during her travels, creating series capturing systems of signage, of land ownership, and of the unpredictability of the weather on the surfaces of urban asphalt.

In Holt’s photographic series Miami Puddles (1969), for example, she maps the Florida city through puddles that have gathered on the streets following rainstorms. The series foreshadows Holt’s use of reflecting pools of water in her later earthworks, as well as in her System Works, to consider the aesthetics and technology of water drainage.

“Nancy Holt: Power Systems” is also the first showing of her 1969 photographic series Texas Claims, a study of private property and nature’s refusal of borders.

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

at Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus
until June 29, 2025