Star-Crossed: An unbuilding

‘ Star-Crossed : An Unbuilding’ is a creative contribution about a site-specific sculpture by the artist Nancy Holt (1938–2014). This sculpture was constructed between 1979 and 1980 on the campus of Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, where I spent my childhood. The article explores the sculpture and its place in the complex historical, social and political landscape of the Midwestern United States. Star-Crossed is an outdoor sculpture made of a grass-covered hill of earth containing two tunnels. At the bottom of the hill is an oval-shaped cement pool filled with water. When viewed through the upper tunnel, the pool appears circular and reflects the sky. Star-Crossed is sited where astronomical and magnetic north meet. The sculpture was constructed by the artist together with university students, faculty and staff. While the opening for Star-Crossed was held in 1979, the piece was not completed until 1980. Over the decades, Star-Crossed fell into disrepair. Holt’s sculpture, one she considered among her most important works, still sits in the field near the woods in my small town. The grass is patchy and the reflecting pool cracked and empty. In 1787, the US Congress passed the Northwest Ordinance, dividing Ohio’s fertile land into grids and squares for White settlers to purchase and own. The land where Star-Crossed is sited was inhabited by several Indigenous peoples, including the Miami tribe, who were forcibly displaced but whose name and iconography were appropriated by the university at its founding in 1809. Thousands of years before, the region was inhabited by peoples who built enormous earthworks still visible in the landscape, and whose forms inspired Nancy Holt in her work. Nancy Holt’s Star-Crossed , designed and built specifically to evoke the complex relationships between landscape, archaeology, history and politics, persists over the decades and continues to press against convention and expectations.