Nancy Holt: Light and Shadow Poetics

What does it mean to notice how we see? Nancy Holt: Light and Shadow Poetics at the MAK Center at the Schindler House offers an encounter where art and architecture shape perception together. Over five decades, Nancy Holt (1938–2014) explored how we perceive the world, and how language, light, sound, and the built environment shape our sense of place. This exhibition brings Holt’s work into a responsive dialogue with the Schindler House, inviting visitors to experience art and architecture as partners in seeing.

At the center of the exhibition is Holt’s 1972 photographic poem California Sun Signs, which gathers the word “sun” as it appears across California’s commercial and infrastructural landscape. The exhibition also features Holt’s audio work—pieces she described as poems in place—alongside works related to her landmark Sun Tunnels project from the mid-1970s. Together, they invite visitors to slow down, to listen, and to notice how perception itself unfolds through space.