The East Coast-native Nancy Holt, who died in 2014, spent her last 20 years in New Mexico, taken with the vastness of the desert. She’d grown up in New Jersey, a state that featured consistently in her oeuvre. “Looking back, I think growing up in New Jersey was a wonderful experience because it’s a limbo place,” Holt said, “surrounded by the decay of the industrial revolution. And New Jersey had the first highway culture.” Though she was a mistress of spatial poetry, Holt never categorized her work as Land Art; she preferred to think of herself as a “perception artist.” Compared to male peers, she flew under the radar. In Barcelona, the first major European survey of Holt’s art presents a wide selection of projects made between 1966 and 1992. —Elena Clavarino