PAF011Nancy Holt, Starfire, 1986
Medium
Steel, fire, and earth
Date
1986
Dimensions
Installation dimensions variable
Photo
Carlson Art Photography. © Holt/Smithson Foundation / Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York.
Nancy Holt, a visionary figure in land art and site-specific installation, spent her career exploring the interplay between celestial phenomena and terrestrial experience. Her foundational work Sun Tunnels (1973–76)—a permanent sculpture in the Great Basin Desert in Utah, part of Dia Art Foundation’s collection—frames the sun’s position at the solstices through four massive concrete cylinders aligned with the rising and setting sun. Both cosmological instrument and perceptual architecture, Sun Tunnels invites viewers to contemplate time, scale, and orientation through the body.
Her 1986 work Starfire continues and distills this cosmic inquiry. The work comprises eight ground-level fire pits arranged to mirror the Big Dipper constellation and the North Star. When lit two hours before sundown, the flames create a terrestrial map of the night sky, bringing the energy of distant stars down to earth. Between ignitions, the circles mark out the fires to come. This alignment invites viewers to contemplate the connection between the cosmos and our immediate environment, grounding the vastness of the night sky within human reach. The work creates a mesmerizing meditation on nature and its profound cycles of energy.
Starfire was first installed on a small island in Ship Creek, Anchorage, Alaska, in 1986, and realized again later that year in Anchorage's Delaney Memorial Park as part of the "Sky Art Alaska" exhibition. Utilizing offcuts from her earlier work Pipeline, Holt and her collaborators embedded steel rings into the earth to form the fire pits. The flames, fueled by gathered wood, transformed the landscape into a luminous map of the stars, emphasizing the dialogue between sky and earth, light and darkness, permanence, and ephemerality. Starfire stands as a testament to Holt's enduring interest in perception, orientation, and the human experience of space and time. By translating celestial configurations into earthly installations, she encourages a deeper awareness of our place within the universe. Realized in close collaboration with Holt/Smithson Foundation, the Powder Mountain installation of Starfire marks the first long-term presentation of this rarely seen work. It anchors the Powder Art Foundation’s collection, extending Holt’s legacy in the region and exemplifying the Foundation’s commitment to site-specificity, temporal awareness, and the evolving legacy of land art.
AboutTheArtist
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, audioworks, film and video, photography, slideworks, ephemeral gestures, drawings, room-sized installations, earthworks, artists’ books, and public sculpture commissions. Across six decades of artmaking, she consistently explored the material and immaterial systems that form our perceptual environment, be that language, the built environment, or our interpretations of the skies above our heads and earth beneath our feet. Holt has exhibited internationally, with her art held in collections including Art Institute of Chicago; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Dia Art Foundation, New York; and Museum of Modern Art, New York. Works by Holt are permanently installed at public institutions including Miami University Art Museum, OH; University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, MA; Western Washington University, WA; and University of South Florida, FL.
