Imagining Contact: Then, When, Now, Here

The Holt/Smithson Foundation Annual Lecture Series is a ten-year program inviting artists, writers, and thinkers to raise questions and present research extending the creative legacies of the artists Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson. Over the course of a decade, the Foundation partners with a different institution each year to host lectures in ten distinct locations, each significant to Holt and Smithson.

Artist Renée Green is the invited speaker for the third Holt/Smithson Foundation Annual Lecture, which will take place at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City on Friday, September 27, 2024 at 6 pm. Green will present a talk titled Imagining Contact: Then, When, Now, Here, and will be in conversation with Lisa Le Feuvre, Executive Director of Holt/Smithson Foundation.

Renée Green’s expansive installation Partially Buried in Three Parts (1996-1997) began with a reflection on the artist Robert Smithson’s (1970), a work primarily known as a photograph and believed to no longer exist. Consisting of Partially Buried (1996), Übertragen/Transfer (1997), and Partially Buried Continued (1997), Green’s multimedia installation grew out of a consid­eration of the year 1970 and the associations became denser in the process of working, becoming a formal and conceptual archaeological endeavor reflecting on the vagaries of memory and historical recall.

In 2024, Green finds herself thinking about a variety of projects which again intersect with the work and thoughts of Smithson, as well as those of Nancy Holt. At present, she is developing new work for Holt/Smithson Foundation’s , for Western Washington University Sculpture Collection, which hosts Holt’s (1977-1978), and for Dia Art Foundation, which is the steward of two of the most iconic earthworks from the late twentieth century: Holt’s (1973-1976), and Smithson’s (1970), both located in Utah.

In considering Holt and Smithson in the present, Green reflects: “As I read, I continue to wonder about that distant time, then, when things happened differently. The traces I find in books stimulate curiosity to further wonder about the places referenced in images, a wish to see what is here, or there, now; I am curious too about what cannot be seen in the images. Questions of both space and place arise. Questions of time also arise. Questions of travel, questions of the environment, built and unbuilt, emerge too as I think and feel, now, here. On earth.”

Holt/Smithson Foundation Annual Lecture Series launched in 2022 at The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, with Anne Wagner, and in 2024 was hosted by New Mexico Museum of Art, with Rebecca Solnit, Lucy Lippard and Desert Artlab as speakers. In 2025 the program travels to the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, the Netherlands, and in 2026 to the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.

More information at: umfa.utah.edu

Image Credit: Renee Green (20th century), American, From "Partially Buried in Three Parts (Kent, Ohio)", LightJet 5000 process on Fujicolor Crystal Archive paper, 1999. Purchased with funds from Dr. James E. and Debra Pearl, and Dr. Donald and Alice Lappe, UMFA2004.3.6

Host or Publisher Utah Museum of Fine Arts