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Little Fort Island is a tiny scrap of land a few hundred feet off the coast of the Down East town of Harrington.
When the tide is low, you can walk there from the mainland. It’s shaped like two humps of a camel, each separated by a low channel that fills with water with the tides. No one’s ever lived on the island or built any structure there; it consists of little more than rocks, seaweed and a few lonely trees.
Acclaimed land artists Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt bought Little Fort Island sight unseen in 1971, with plans to transform it into one of the couple’s earthworks — a living piece of art inspired by the changing state of our planet. But when the couple finally visited the island in 1972, both agreed it was too beautiful to alter. It has remained untouched ever since.
Smithson died a year later in a plane crash. Nancy Holt owned Little Fort until her death in 2014, and ownership of the island transferred to the Holt/Smithson Foundation, an organization established in 2018 in order to carry on their artistic legacy — one of thinking deeply about place, time and how humans make their mark on the Earth.
Now, more than 50 years after the couple first acquired the island, the New Mexico-based foundation is in the midst of the multi-year Island Project, with five artists set to create works inspired by Holt and Smithson and by Little Fort Island, and its ephemeral, ever-changing nature.
“It’s a very slow project, and one that really requires a great deal of rumination and time,” said Lisa Le Feuvre, executive director of Holt/Smithson. “What do we think about this tiny, specific location, and how do we place it in the imagination of others?”
Robert Smithson was a sculptor and painter initially associated with the minimalism movement. In the late 1960s he began to create his massive works of land art — a movement in the 1960s and 1970s that used earth materials and the land itself as the canvas through which to explore themes of time, change and humanity’s impact on the environment. His most famous work is Spiral Jetty, a 1,500-foot long sculpture made of rocks, salt and mud that coils into the northeastern shore of the Great Salt Lake in Utah.
Nancy Holt worked in many different mediums, including sculpture, photography, text and video, before also turning to the land art movement alongside her husband, Smithson. Over the course of a more than five-decade career, she created major works of art all across the U.S. and Canada, including her seminal work Sun Tunnels, an installation in Utah’s Great Basin Desert that aligns with the solstices.
Le Feuvre said that no one is entirely certain how Little Fort Island came across Holt and Smithson’s radars in the early 1970s — only that they wanted to make a project on an island, and, somehow, they were able to purchase this one. The history of the island itself is also a little hazy, since it’s never been permanently inhabited. It was known to Wabanaki peoples for centuries, and starting sometime in the 18th or 19th century a chain of ownership among local residents began, before it was finally sold to the couple in 1971.
“The idea of owning an island and possessing a piece of land like that wasn’t really in their vocabulary,” she said. “They were really only interested in what an island means, and how they could work with it.”
Le Feuvre and her colleagues first visited Little Fort in 2021. The best way to get there is not by boat, but by walking there at low tide. Le Feuvre walked barefoot, sinking into the mud and nearly cutting her feet on mussel shells, before clambering up on its rocky shores.
“One thing we know about this island is that it’s not likely to be there forever, as sea levels rise,” said Le Feuvre, who herself grew up on the island of Guernsey, in the English Channel. “Islands feel the impact of the climate emergency first. They are always places that are on the edge.”
The foundation has selected five artists to create works inspired by Little Fort Island: Tacita Dean, Renee Green, Sky Hopinka, Oscar Santillan and Joan Jonas, the latter of whom was a close friend of both Holt and Smithson. Le Feuvre said it’s possible that none of the artists will actually place their works on the island itself. Some of the works will be exhibited at Maine arts institutes; others will be sited elsewhere.
The Island Project will begin showing each artists’ works sometime in 2026, with the project taking a total of five years to complete. Afterwards, Little Fort Island will return to its natural state; always in flux as the elements around it change.
In accordance with Holt’s wishes, the Holt/Smithson Foundation will terminate as an organization in 2038, 20 years after it began in 2018 and 100 years after both Holt and Smithson were born. Around that time, Le Feuvre said the foundation plans to donate Little Fort Island to either an Indigenous organization, or to a nature conservancy.
“It’s really important that the island retains its island identity, and doesn’t become part of the built environment,” she said. “Should anyone even possess an island? It’s a complicated idea.”
