Holt loved the West on sight. Its austere terrain; its piercing, inescapable sunlight; vast arid plains punctuated by occasional horizon blips of hills and mesas that, rather than disturbing the viewer’s sense of open space, helped to locate their place within it. Her attraction to the desert was instant, but her description of her formative trip there was, in fact, heavily mediated. The Smithsonian interview has antecedents extending back to September 1976, when Holt gave a tour of Sun Tunnels to a young filmmaker named Ardele Lister. As she described to Lister, “I guess it’s the agelessness, primordialness, being in touch with milleniums, feeling connected with people who lived here 20,000 years ago, knowing they saw the same sunset, the sun setting where I’m seeing it.”5The conversation was recorded but never published. Instead, Holt kept its 79-page transcript,6underlining passages and making small typographical notes, revising her responses over the better part of a year. What resulted was the now canonical essay, also titled “Sun Tunnels,” published in Artforum in April, 1977—in which Holt had edited Lister out entirely. . .