By Annie Dell’Aria, Associate Professor of Art History
For anyone who has ventured behind the Richard and Carole Cocks Art Museum (RCCAM), the sight of Nancy Holt’s Star-Crossed is a puzzling surprise. These intersecting tubes of concrete, topped by an unruly mound of earth and grass, seem out of place next to the woods and set among the pristinely mowed rolling hills of grass set against the sleek angles of the RCCAM building. Venturing down the steep slope, the structure becomes enterable, causing voices to echo and cooling the air. The smaller, angled tunnel points towards an elliptical indentation in the ground—an empty, cracked, and overgrown reflection pool. From atop this curious mound, this shape appears to morph into a circle that aligns perfectly with the round tunnel’s aperture. From the ground, the tunnel frames a vignette of the sky, like an archaic telescope marking a point in the heavens.
This curious structure is the work of American artist Nancy Holt (1938-2014), one of the most significant practitioners of Land Art. Emerging out of the tumultuous decade of the 1960s, Land Art sought to move beyond the walls of the art gallery and make the earth itself into a sculptural medium. Artists like Michael Heizer (b. 1944) and Robert Smithson (1938-1973) turned to bulldozers and dynamite to make massive sculptures in remote locations in the American southwest. Holt’s contributions to the field maintained a photographer’s interest in optics and encouraged viewers to look up to the sky as much as feel the manipulation of the earth. Sun Tunnels (1973-1976), perhaps her most famous piece, achieves this through punctures in the tunnels’ walls to project abstractions of constellations onto the ground inside the cooling, strange comfort of these industrial forms set out in the Great Utah Basin Desert. This work skyrocketed Holt’s artworld fame as it was featured on the cover of the major art magazine Artforum in 1977. At the end of the fall semester of 1978, students and faculty in Miami’s Department of Architecture, led by Tom Bible, invited Holt to come to campus for a week-long residency. What followed was a four-year relationship that saw Holt visit campus multiple times, create two original sculptures (Star-Crossed as well as the now-destroyed Polar Circle (1979)), and collaborate with faculty, students, and heavy machine operators here in Oxford.
Interested in this sculpture ever since I arrived at Miami to teach Modern and Contemporary Art in 2016, I was curious to know more about this process and how this sculpture connected with the history of this place. Supported by a research fellowship from the Holt/Smithson Foundation in the summer of 2023, I combed materials at both the Smithsonian Archives of American Art and RCCAM’s archives at Miami University. This included correspondence dating back to the initial invitation, Holt’s sketches and notebooks, bills and regulations, and the first-person account documented in (now retired) Art History Professor Clive Getty’s notebooks. This research resulted in two public lectures and a formal report, as well as on-going plans for a book and scholarly article.
Like the cut-out constellations in her famous Sun Tunnels, Star-Crossed similarly “brings the sky down to the earth,” in Holt’s words, as its telescopic tunnel frames Polaris—the north star—making the entire structure into a compass of sorts. During one of her many visits to Miami’s campus, Holt discovered that in Oxford, magnetic and astronomical north actually align, which she read as an auspicious sign for the work’s success. Ideally, this slice of sky would reflect in the oblong pool, but issues with drainage and the passage of time have made this component of the work into more of an accidental ruin than a functioning waterwork. Also likely unintended by many of those present at that auspicious discovery in 1979, magnetic north shifts overtime, meaning its astronomical alignment is somewhat of a time-capsule of this place in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the years when the structure was designed, stalled, started, rebuilt, and completed. Aside from the empty pool, the work is in good condition today, and visitors can climb and safely enter the sculpture. The RCCAM team is working to conserve the pipes for future generations and exploring options for the reflecting pool.
To my thinking, the complete story of Star-Crossed is then a snapshot of multiple transitions. As an institution, Miami was expanding onto the grounds of the recently closed Western College for Women; and higher education itself was shifting towards a model more informed by private sector marketing than public service missions. For Holt, she made this work on the heels of her breakout success with Sun Tunnels and just before completing her major urban commission Dark Star Park (1979-1984, Arlington, VA). The archives tell a story of one of the few land artists to successfully shift from remote landscapes to urban parks and university campuses. It also tells the story of a woman struggling to carve a place for herself in the field while simultaneously managing the estate and legacy of Land Art’s brightest star, her recently deceased husband, Robert Smithson.
Not only one of Miami’s most significant works of art in its collection, Star-Crossed is an important work of American art and a fascinating case study on the history of universities and the shifting landscape for women sculptors in the late twentieth century.
Annie Dell’Aria is Associate Professor of Art History and teaches courses on Modern and Contemporary Art. She earned her A.B. from Harvard University and Ph.D. from The Graduate Center, CUNY. She is the author of the book The Moving Image as Public Art: Sidewalk Spectators and Modes of Enchantment (2021) as well as a number of articles and book chapters on topics ranging from the public art in the television series Parks and Rec to the role of touch in contemporary video art.
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