Ernest Graham Archive

Located in the heart of the Gold Coast, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in Fine Arts has been one of Chicago’s most prestigious cultural institutions since 1956. The Graham Foundation is available to the public not only as a forum on architecture and design but also as a gallery. The 2011 season opens October 7 with the exhibition Nancy Holt: Sightlines.

The Foundation awards project-based grants and creates public programs to encourage the development and exchange of challenging ideas about architecture and its role in the arts, culture and society. Created by prominent Chicago architect Ernest R. Graham, the Foundation has awarded more than 3,900 grants to individuals and organizations.

Nancy Holt, Concrete Visions, 1967, composite of four 126-format black-and-white photographs, New Jersey.

The Graham Foundation seeks to provide opportunities to create projects in a way that will contribute to artists’ creative, intellectual and professional growth at critical stages in their careers. By providing a space to take positions and engage in debate, artists and their communities work to develop new forms of expression. A crucial piece of Chicago’s history, the Graham Foundation helps integrate artists and their work with the community at large.

The Graham Foundation has truly stood the test of time. By continuing to take necessary risks to support innovative architectural projects, they maintain their commitment to Ernest Graham’s original concepts. Every grant applicant is considered on an objective basis, providing a platform to support new and existing artists and communicate their work in the public sphere, reaching wide and diverse audiences.

Nancy Holt: Sightlines
October 2 – December 17, 2011

Nancy Holt shooting the film Sun Tunnels, 1978, The Papers of Nancy Holt, Galisteo, New Mexico. Photo Lee Deffebach.

Opening October 2, the Graham Foundation presents Nancy Holt: Sightlines, offering an in-depth look at the early projects of this important American artist whose pioneering work falls at the intersection of art, architecture and time-based media. A symposium, artists talk and book-signing talk will take place on Saturday, October 8.

Since the late 1960s, Nancy Holt has created a diverse body of work, including films, videos, installations, sound art and concrete poetry. The exhibition includes documentation from more than 40 different projects, showcasing films, videos and related works from 1966 to 1980.The exhibit also features pivotal works that transform how we perceive landscape through the use of different observational modes.

Nancy Holt, Views Through a Sand Dune, 1972, cement-asbestos pipe, sand, Narragansett Beach, Rhode Island.

Featured in the exhibition are Holt’s film Sun Tunnels (1978), which documents the creation of her well-known site-specific work Sun Tunnels, and Pine Barrens (1975), a meditative documentary about a notoriously vast, undeveloped region in central New Jersey. Through her use of cylindrical forms, light and techniques of reflection, Holt allows viewers to engage with the landscape in new and challenging ways.

Nancy Holt has been awarded numerous prestigious awards, including five National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Internationally recognized, Holt’s work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Tate Modern in London, and elsewhere.

Nancy Holt, Preparatory drawing of “Sun Tunnels,” 1975, pencil and twelve black and white photographs on paper, 14x20in.

Nancy Holt, Sun Tunnels, 1973-76, concrete, steel, earth. Great Basin Desert, Utah.

The Graham Foundation is located in the Madlener House, 4 West Burton Place. For additional information, call 312. 787.4071 or visit Graham Foundation.

Emmaline Niendorf is an Integrated Marketing Associate with Otherwise Incorporated.