Currently on view at the Betty and Edward Marcus Sculpture Park at Laguna Gloria

A pioneer of Land art in the late 1960s and 1970s, Nancy Holt was one of several key figures who sought to integrate art with the landscape and explore the potential of the American West. Time Span was commissioned for this site by the then-named Laguna Gloria Art Museum and shows Holt’s interest in the relationship between human perception, the natural environment, and the passage of time.

In this work, Holt highlights the overlapping cycles of personal and astronomical time: each year on April 5, the artist’s birthday, the shadow cast by the angle of the afternoon sun through the sculpture’s steel wheel frames a plaque on the ground inscribed with the artwork’s date of completion, also April 5. Despite the solidity of its materials, Time Span reflects change, offering variable sight lines of the surrounding landscape at different times of the day and year.