Notebooks
name: label: Collection Creator
content: Holt, Nancy, 1938-2014
setName: label: See more items in
content: Nancy Holt Estate records
label: See more items in
content: Nancy Holt Estate records / Series 3: Writings, Calendars, and Notebooks
unitdate: label: Date
content: circa 1970s-2013
dataSource: label: Archival Repository
content: Archives of American Art
identifier: label: Identifier
content: AAA.holtnanc, Subseries 3.3
objectType: label: Type
content: Archival materials
scopecontent: label: Scope and Contents
content: Notebooks are a primarily spiral-bound and many are dated by Holt on the front cover and are sequential. They contain a wide variety of information including journal entries, notes and small sketches related to current projects, many drafts of letters including to other artists, to do lists, names and addresses, records of phone calls, and everyday life notations such as recipes and lists. Later notebooks reveal Holt's growing interest in Buddhism, meditation, and dream journaling. One notebook contains childhood memories captured in a single sentence, one per page.

One of the earliest notebooks contains entries dating from 1970-1974 and consists primarily of journal entries which provide insight into Holt's ideas at the time, and her evolving sense of identity. She writes about her relationship with Robert Smithson, artist friends including Richard Serra, Carl Andre, and others, her spirituality, and her need for connection with other women in her growth as an artist, among many other things. Two of the notebooks are labeled as relating to the project 30 Below (1979) and the film Pine Barrens (1975), but many of Holt's projects, including Sun Tunnels (1976) are also documented to some extent in this series.