Nancy Holt came to the desert for the first time in 1968, when she embarked on a tour of the American Southwest alongside her husband Robert Smithson and friend Michael Heizer, both influential male artists of the Land Art Movement. Holt's attraction to the desert—and in particular its primordiality—was instant, and their trip would initiate nearly a decade of attempts to situate herself and her work within its timeless expanse. Who were humankind’s ancient ancestors, with whom she shared glimpses of the same desert sunrises and sunsets? This attention to an enduring cosmology would inspire her 1976 work "Sun Tunnels," in Utah's Great Basin. It is in honor of that celestial alignment that this piece is published on the summer solstice.