The Story behind “Sun Tunnels,” Nancy Holt’s Land Art Masterpiece

In 1976, after three years of planning and multiple treks to the desert bordering Utah and Nevada, Nancy Holt finished what was to become her defining work. By this time, the sculptor and filmmaker had some well-received shows to her name; a famous, recently deceased husband whose career had largely overshadowed her own; and 40 acres of land in Utah’s Great Basin Desert. Sun Tunnels (1973–76) is composed of four massive cylindrical, concrete forms—large enough for a viewer to walk inside without ducking—positioned in a cross formation on the desert’s cracked clay floor. The project had been initiated shortly before Holt’s partner, Robert Smithson, died in a freak airplane crash in Texas. In the subsequent years, his widow spent countless secluded months in the Southwest, experimenting, scouting sites, and establishing her own personal relationship with the land.

Sun Tunnels stands with Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970)and his friend (and rival) Michael Heizer’s Double Negative (1969–70)as among the most important contributions to the land art movement. Smithson’s iconic earthwork, a giant basalt helix built into the edge of Utah’s Great Salt Lake, was created with the expectation that it will ultimately recede back into the water. The monumental work therefore manifests the indomitable entropic forces the artist explored throughout his career.

Meanwhile, Double Negative—two massive trenches cut into a mesa in the Nevada Desert—carries with it an implicit violence. As Heizer himself described it, “Double Negative is really a scar of a kind. An intrusion of nature, an assault of some sort. It’s as though a surgeon took an exploratory cut of a mesa to show its innards.” Sun Tunnels, however, neither degenerates nor threatens; instead, it foregrounds the body as the primary site of the piece’s activation.

Like Spiral Jetty and Double Negative, Sun Tunnels stands as a massive testament to human will. The work’s orientation is precisely calibrated so that its four tubes frame the sun on the horizon at the summer and winter solstices, creating a kind of lens that engulfs the body. Small holes in the tubes, modeled on the position of four constellations, throw scattered discs of light onto the viewer nestled inside.

Creating the work entailed hauling tons of concrete into the desert, working with engineers, astrologists, contractors, and crane operators. Unlike other land art artists, who tended to hide all traces of their work’s construction, Holt meticulously documented this labor in extensive notes, as well as a film of the same name. “The workers seemed to care about the work they were doing for me,” she observed in one unpublished typewritten account. “The filming in both 16mm and still photography gave them an increased consciousness of their acts.”

Yet the resulting installation, for all its virtuosic elegance, serves as a slight diversion from Holt’s greater innovation, revealed only after a succession of interviews with Holt’s peers and scholars of her work.

Shortly after the work’s completion, Holt took artist Richard Serra and filmmaker and media activist DeeDee Halleck to see the site. As Halleck recalled, “We arrived there near sunset, and we all three slept out in the tunnels—three different tunnels.” She continued, “We woke up really early, at sunrise, and I remember thinking how there was so much life.”