Following the lead of artists challenging the traditional studio, gallery, and museum system, and during a time of broader social change, Dia is conceived as a counter institution with a distinctive ethos and directive that will remain at the center of the institution’s activities. Never associated with a single site or location, nor even solely with New York where it was founded, Dia focuses on individual artists’ visions and the realization of works wherever they may be constituted.

During the foundation’s early years, Dia offers unique patronage to a select group of artists, which include Joseph Beuys, John Chamberlain, Walter De Maria, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Imi Knoebel, Blinky Palermo, Fred Sandback, James Turrell, Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol, Robert Whitman, and La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela. This commitment reflects the co-founders’ interest in artists from the U.S. and Europe (predominantly Germany) who question the status of the art object and install work such that space and site are integral to its effect on the viewer.

Through extensive material support, Dia engages deeply with artists on its roster to realize their commissions and collect their work. In January 1979, having already commissioned and presented several permanent and long-term displays, Dia develops the concept of individual-artist institutes dedicated to the exhibition, production, and preservation of a single artist’s work. The locations chosen reflect the site-responsive nature of each artist’s practice, ranging from sites in the western U.S., to outer Long Island, rural Massachusetts, and coastal Connecticut, as well as several in New York. Understanding the aesthetic potential of industrial architecture, the foundation identifies, for purchase or lease, abandoned or defunct factories or commercial sites for the purpose of artist studios or permanent displays. Their size, sturdiness, and structural simplicity, along with the proclivity to repurpose existing architecture rather than build anew, come to define the characteristics of a Dia location.

The festival opens with a Dream House, Young and Zazeela’s signature sound-and-light environment, which forms the context for 13 performances by Young’s ensemble the Theater of Eternal Music. The second half of the Dream Festival includes the American premiere of Young’s The Well-Tuned Piano (1964–73–81– ), a memorial concert series honoring electronic composer Richard Maxfield; a series of morning, afternoon, and evening ragas performed by Pandit Pran Nath; and performances of electronic music by Terry Riley and Jon Hassell with David Rosenboom; all of which are presented within the visual environment of the exhibition Marian Zazeela: Lights, Drawings (1975).

In late 1977, Dia acquires a custom Bösendorfer Imperial Grand Piano tuned for Young’s The Well-Tuned Piano, which is celebrated the following year with a series of performances at Heiner Friedrich’s gallery at 393 West Broadway coinciding with the exhibition Marian Zazeela: Light (September 10–24, 1978). Through 1979, Dia continues to sponsor raga performances by Pran Nath, in tribute to the Kirana style of North Indian classical vocal music, at 393 West Broadway and other venues.

In February 1979, Dia purchases for Young and Zazeela a former mercantile-exchange building at 6 Harrison Street in Tribeca, which opens with the first of what will become the annual Raga Cycle series of performances by Pran Nath. Young and Zazeela install another Dream House (1979–85), which includes Zazeela’s light environment The Magenta Lights (1980– ) and is open to the public between 1981 and 1985. In addition to Young, Zazeela, and Pran Nath living and working in the building’s upper floors, the space is used as a rehearsal hall, holds archives for the artists’ work, and is a center for teaching Kirana music. The Dream House continues today at 275 Church Street in New York, operated by the MELA Foundation in collaboration with the artists.

Initially intended for the Whitney Museum of American Art’s bicentennial exhibition 200 Years of American Sculpture (1976), the work, untitled (1976–77), is realized over the course of a year with Dia’s financial and logistical support in partnership with the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) Arts for Transit program (the first of several collaborations between Dia and the MTA). The first installation, on platform 39–40, opens to the public in 1976, with subsequent installations opening on platforms 18–19 and 41–42 the following year, where they remain until 1986.

Flavin’s relighting of the platforms engages the structural elements of the station, immersing passengers in a soft complimentary continuity of blue, intensified en route by pink and gold. The completed work comprises 152 modular fluorescent units made up of eight- and four-foot-long fixtures, facing downward and outward, respectively. The daylight (blued) whites stream together and the pink and gold spark out on either side as one stands slightly to the right or left of center. The modular units link together into a receding linear procession, introducing an intense perspectival direction into the dark tunnel beyond.

The artist fills the gallery space with 222 cubic yards of earth, to a depth of 22 inches, creating an interior “earth sculpture.” Compelled by how the work’s formal simplicity engenders such a commanding physical presence, Friedrich, Fariha Friedrich (then Philippa de Menil), and Helen Winkler Fosdick, in close consultation with the artist, determine that the work should remain on permanent view as a Dia site. Friedrich donates the gallery space to Dia, after which it is renovated by architect Richard Gluckman, to De Maria’s specifications, to support the permanent display of the work. The exhibition of The New York Earth Room reopens at 141 Wooster Street on New Year’s Day 1980 and remains on view to this day.

A one-kilometer-long, polished-brass rod is buried vertically at the intersection of two footpaths crossing at Friedrichsplatz Park, an 18th-century public square, leaving only the flat circumference of one end visible within a square sandstone plate at ground level, which renders abstract any sense of distance or depth. It takes 79 days to drill the shaft, which passes through six geological layers. Supported by the city of Kassel, the work is ultimately designated as a permanent installation. In 1979, De Maria creates The Broken Kilometer—also a permanent installation commissioned by Dia—as a companion piece to The Vertical Earth Kilometer.

The artist first used the material in the mid-1960s in a series of small, geometric sculptures, and highly polished metals will be subsequently featured in several of his most recognizable works. At The Lightning Field, the vertical poles vary in height to compensate for the earth’s undulating surface, creating a level plane that could support a plate of glass. The Lightning Field juxtaposes imperial and metric standards against the vast expanse of the American desert. Within this context, the hard edges of these empirical systems of observation dissolve against the seemingly boundless, wide-open space. Moreover, The Lightning Field requires both movement and time to be fully experienced. In addition to the physical terrain that the project occupies, the work is animated by changing light conditions, which cause the poles to come in and out of focus throughout the day. 

De Maria determines that visitors need a full 24 hours at the site, and he arranges for the refurbishment of a historic homestead cabin where up to six people at a time can spend the night. Throughout this enormous undertaking Dia co-founder Helen Winkler Fosdick and her husband, artist Robert Fosdick, relocate to New Mexico for several years to help oversee the logistics of moving and renovating the cabin and installing the poles according to De Maria’s precise instructions. Following their departure, a dedicated team of local caretakers led by foreman Robert Weathers continues to keep De Maria’s vision for the site alive.

As “one painting,” Shadows’ equally sized canvases hang edge to edge and low to the ground. While Shadows is fixed by these physical terms, the number of visible panels and their arrangement vary according to the size of an exhibition space; the work in total contracts, expands, and recalibrates each time it is installed. Shadows is one of Warhol’s most abstract works, with its repetitive screenprints offset and inflected by the loose, gestural mopping of paint onto each monochromatic canvas. As Warhol dryly explained, the paintings are mostly the same except for their colors—that is, in Shadows, color assumes the position of the work’s subject. Despite Warhol’s self-effacing dismissal of the works as “disco décor,” these paintings substantiate a genuine interest in composition, method, and style, indeed the practice of painting itself. 

In the following years, Shadows is reinstalled at various Dia locations and fellow institutions in a variety of sequences. Its current presentation at Dia Beacon (December 2023– ) returns Shadows to the sequence from its original exhibition in 1979.

Formalized in 1978–79, the commission delineates the monumental scale of the project, with Dia acquiring multiple properties selected by Judd and underwriting the artist’s design, fabrication, and installation of interior and exterior sculptures realized specifically for these architectural spaces and the surrounding landscape, most notably the sculptures that constitute Judd’s 100 untitled works in mill aluminum (1982–86). The project also encompasses an exhibition space for the presentation of works by John Chamberlain, Dan Flavin, and other artists of Judd’s choosing, as well as administrative and curatorial staff to realize the project and facilitate public access. A destination envisioned by Judd from beginning to end, it is also indicative of Dia’s support for works made following an artist’s deep engagement with a particular site or location such as the western U.S. In 1986, the Chinati Foundation is established as an independent nonprofit to administer and preserve the site. Dia grants Chinati all of its Marfa property and related artwork holdings, along with funding for the first four years of its operations. The site remains open to this day.

Collectively weighing 18 ¾ tons and measuring one kilometer when laid end to end, the work mirrors De Maria’s The Vertical Earth Kilometer (1977), a companion piece permanently installed in Kassel, Germany, consisting of a brass rod of identical diameter, total length, and weight, inserted vertically into the earth.

De Maria deploys numerical sequencing as a compositional principle to achieve a semblance of regularity. The appearance of a rational grid is thus an optical illusion created by the slightly increasing intervals between the brass rods as they recede from the viewer. Working with architect Richard Gluckman and engineer Michael Kellough on the installation design and renovations to the space, De Maria devises this arrangement and the halide stadium lighting such that each rod is rendered visible into the far reaches of the gallery space. Initially exhibited from April 14 to June 30, 1979, as part of a series of single-artist presentations at 393 West Broadway, The Broken Kilometer draws 5,225 attendees in its first month on view. On October 20, 1979, The Broken Kilometer reopens as a permanent Dia site and has remained on long-term view to the public since then. 

Dia intends for the space to be a site for the study and exhibition of the foundation’s collection of Flavin’s work, as well as the artist’s archives and printshop, and hires Flavin to design the exhibition environment. One wing is to display Dia’s collection of landscape drawings, watercolors, and oil sketches from the Hudson River School, a group of 19th-century artists whose works were created in the vicinity of Garrison and retain a historical affinity to the area. The project ultimately proves too vast a challenge to realize and, by 1985, the Dan Flavin Art Institute operates solely out of its Bridgehampton location. The Castle is sold in 1987. 

In 1979, Dia deepens its patronage with the purchase of a three-story building on West 19th Street in Chelsea, known as Whitman Projects, as a venue and archives for the production, presentation, and documentation of the artist’s work. The earliest performances at Whitman Projects are held in December of 1980, presenting revivals of Prune Flat (1965) and Light Touch. In 1982, Whitman premieres Raincover, an extravagant production comprising multiple film projections, set pieces, and choreographed movements unfolding over an hour on a 30-foot-long proscenium stage. Between 1983 and 1984, Dia funds the Whitman Projects performances of the artist’s Eclipse (1983) and his wife Sylvia Palacios’s Irregulars (1983). 

During this time, Dia also supports Whitman’s interest in radical site-specificity, beginning in 1979 with a commission to create an environmental installation at the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers, New York. Inhabiting built and natural environments on either side of the Hudson River, Palisade comprises a multimedia installation of projections within the museum gallery and an outdoor installation at the base of the New Jersey Palisades on the opposing riverbanks. In 1980, Dia presents Whitman’s Stound, an outdoor performance combining film, found objects, and neighboring ponds, open fields, and woods at the Snug Harbor Cultural Center in Staten Island. Then, in 1981, Whitman returns to the Undercliff section of the Palisades State Park with A Walk in the Park, a nocturnal performance with film elements that unfolds along the park’s byways.

Dia’s relationship with Whitman continues in 2003 when Robert Whitman: Playback, the first major retrospective of the artist’s work, goes on view at Dia’s Chelsea galleries. The exhibition, which includes revivals of Prune Flat and Light Touch, goes on to tour internationally. Much later, in 2011, Whitman renews his earlier interest in theatrical works transmitted across man-made and natural environments with Passport, co-commissioned by Dia and performed simultaneously at the Kasser Theater in Montclair, New Jersey, and on the Hudson River waterfront, as well as MoonRain, staged in a fog environment filling the lower-level galleries of Dia Beacon.

The Fred Sandback Museum opens to the public in June 1981 with installations of three-dimensional constructions on the first two floors, and an exhibition of nearly 50 drawings and graphic works in the basement gallery, which also includes an archive reading room. In 1988–89, Dia complements the presentations at Sandback’s studio and museum with a yearlong exhibition of his recent sculptures at 155 Mercer Street in SoHo, New York. In 1996–97, the artist reinstalls his works from the collection alongside newer pieces at Dia’s Chelsea space. In 2003, Sandback is included in the inaugural exhibitions of Dia Beacon. The configurations, which address the vast scale of the renovated factory space, are some of the last to be installed by the artist during his lifetime. Sandback’s sculptures remain on long-term view at Dia Beacon today.

In 1981, Masjid al-Farah opens at 155 Mercer Street as a permanent venue for hosting Sufi ceremonies. An “avant garde Sufi lodge for the ages,” the interior ultimately features Dan Flavin’s untitled (1982), comprising four installations of the same name with a different sculpture installed on each floor, as well as bathrooms renovated for ritual washing and Persian carpets throughout. Here, Sheikh Muzaffer Ozak Ashki al-Jerrahi, leader of the Halveti-Jerrahi Order of Dervishes of Istanbul, holds dhikr, a weekly ceremony of ritual dance and Sufi teachings, followed by a generous feast.

In February 1985, the Sheikh passes away unexpectedly at the age of 69, coinciding with major changes to Dia’s organizational structure. Soon after, Masjid al-Farah moves to a smaller building in New York’s Tribeca neighborhood and Dia’s staff relocate to the second floor of 155 Mercer Street, where administrator Joan Duddy later develops the Salon Project performance series with dancer-choreographer Susan Osberg.

The gallery opens in 1982 with an exhibition of Barnett Newman’s paintings spanning his career from 1946 to 1968. Newman’s first solo presentation in New York in a decade, this rotating exhibition remains on view through March 1985. From 1985 to 1986, Dia presents an exhibition of Cy Twombly’s paintings and drawings, featuring the first public viewing of Twombly’s Treatise on the Veil (Second Version) (1970), which, at nearly 32 feet in length, was one of the artist’s largest canvases to date.

In 1986, Dia presents three consecutive exhibitions by Andy Warhol, drawing heavily from the foundation’s in-depth collection his work. The series begins with the first New York presentation of the artist's Disaster paintings from 1963, followed by an exhibition of early hand-painted images dating from 1960 to 1962 which include never-before-seen works from Warhol’s own collection. The third of these exhibitions, Andy Warhol: Skulls 1976, brings together a range of media, including variously sized canvases, drawings, and collages, all featuring the iconic image of an isolated human skull. Warhol works on the installation, which is meant to include an unrealized wallpaper based on one of the Skulls drawings, in the months before his death.

Starting in 1987, coinciding with the opening of Dia’s expansive exhibition space in Chelsea, 77 Wooster Street becomes a space for artists’ projects using experimental formats to critically address political issues. The collective Group Material organizes a four-part exhibition and public forum around the theme of Democracy, after which Martha Rosler’s 1989 project If You Lived Here . . . responds to the political and economic issues of urban housing, gentrification, and houselessness in New York.

The presentation at 67 Vestry Street in Tribeca is primarily comprised of works dating from 1975 to 1980, when Chamberlain was actively working in the studio, and their installation in the space is undertaken with the artist’s direction. The Chamberlain Gardens in Essex, sited on 10 acres of intercoastal lands adjoining the artist’s former outdoor studio along the Connecticut River, presents 23 monumental crushed-steel sculptures commissioned by the foundation and placed by the artist in both landscaped and natural environments, complemented by a number of smaller sculptures and works on paper from the artist’s personal collection. The project echoes Dia’s earlier exhibition of Chamberlain’s Texas Pieces on the grounds of the Manhattan Psychiatric Center at Ward’s Island, New York, in 1977–78, which also provided public access to the artist’s work in an outdoor setting.

Working closely with architect Richard Gluckman and Dia’s director of operations James Schaeufele, Flavin oversees the building’s renovation between 1981 and 1983, making key decisions to best accommodate his work and preserve the property’s multiple legacies. To memorialize the building’s former life as a volunteer fire department, the barn-style double doors from the firehouse entrance are refurbished and the newel post in the vestibule is painted fire-engine red. The church doors and frosted-glass windows are moved to the back room of the second floor, which hosts a display of memorabilia from the First Baptist Church, including a neon cross. In keeping with his practice of acknowledging friends, relatives, curators, or historical personages in the titles of his work, Flavin dedicates the building to Schaeufele. 

Selected and arranged by the artist, nine sculptures in fluorescent light (1963–81) offers an inventory of the possibilities for readymade colored light in relation to architecture. Composed of circular fluorescent fixtures in three temperatures of white (cool, daylight, and warm), untitled (to Jim Schaeufele) 1, 2, and 3 (all 1972) punctuate the ascent up the vestibule’s staircase. These works remain on view at the Dan Flavin Art Institute to this day. 

Starting in 1987, independent curator Henry Geldzahler advises Dia on a series of monographic exhibitions featuring artists with ties to the East End of Long Island such as Louise Bourgeois, Alice Neel, Cy Twombly, and Andy Warhol. The foundation continues to present yearly exhibitions of artists primarily residing or working on Long Island and in 2020 renames the location Dia Bridgehampton. Still containing within it the Dan Flavin Art Institute, the location remains a testament to the compelling experience generated by a concentration of the artist’s light works in a carefully calibrated setting. The building is a lasting example of Dia and Flavin’s collaborative vision and shared preoccupation with site-specificity. 

Under reduced financial circumstances, Dia’s programs are dramatically restructured and many of its real estate holdings are sold or donated. In 1986, the Chinati Foundation is established to independently operate Donald Judd’s projects in Marfa, Texas. With this reduced footprint, Dia’s programming reorients to support rotating single-artist exhibitions and projects, and the initiation of new programs supporting dance, poetry, and lectures on contemporary culture. 

Within one year’s time, the building becomes a pillar of the downtown dance scene, fostering a community of artists. In 1986, Susan Osberg, artistic director of the Workwith Dancers Company, initiates the Salon Project, an annual fall event that features new work by choreographers. Co-curated by Osberg and Duddy, the project runs until 1995, presenting over 90 choreographers in all stages of their careers, including Arthur Aviles, Molissa Fenley, Bill T. Jones, Ralph Lemon, David Parker, Lucio Pozzi, Sara Rudner, Anna Sokolow, and Muna Tseng. While the majority of the building’s spaces are used on a short-term basis by emerging artists, others, such as Laura Dean, schedule regular rehearsals, becoming fixtures within the community. As Duddy observed, Dean was an excellent fit for Dia’s space, “as a signature element of her choreographic technique took inspiration from the Sufi whirling technique,” harkening to the building’s earlier incarnation.

With abundant natural light filtering in from windows around the perimeter, each 9,000-square-foot level has an open plan with columns plotted on a grid. The building opens to the public on October 9, 1987, with an inaugural exhibition of Joseph Beuys, Imi Knoebel, and Blinky Palermo spanning three floors, each dedicated to an individual artist. 

In the following years, Dia expands this model of devoting each floor to a long-term, single-artist presentation to include large-scale, site-responsive commissions of emerging artists; focused solo exhibitions developed in collaboration with established artists; and displays from the collection. With many of these presentations remaining on view for at least one year, Dia’s artist-centric model provides an unprecedented platform for artists to develop projects that invite repeated viewings. 

Between 1991 and 2004, Dia’s presence in Chelsea, under the new name Dia Center for the Arts, gradually expands alongside its exhibition program. With the purchase of buildings on the north side of West 22nd Street and the move of the administrative offices, all four floors of 548 are devoted to large-scale, single-artist projects. In 1997, Dia Center for the Arts inaugurates a second exhibition space across the street at 545 West 22nd Street with the debut of Richard Serra’s Torqued Ellipses (1996–97). From 1995 to 2000, Dia commissions artists to create billboards affixed to the rail bridge over West 22nd Street (now the High Line).

The last exhibition season of Dia Center for the Arts in Chelsea ends in 2004, following the opening of Dia Beacon and a subsequent shift of programming to take advantage of the museum’s vast space and natural setting. During the intervening years, Dia continues to hold artist talks and lectures at 535 and, in 2010, resumes monthly poetry readings. After a long hiatus, 541 temporarily reopens as an artist-project space in 2012, setting the stage for a renewed presence and commissioning program as Dia Chelsea in 2015.

After a brief break, Readings in Contemporary Poetry restarts in the fall of 2010 under the leadership of Vincent Katz, until 2021 when the program is reimagined.

Today, the program series titled Poetry & pairs a poet with an artist working in a different field to create a unique art experience. Curated by Kamilah Foreman, Dia’s director of publications, and José Olivarez, the interdisciplinary series manifests the vitality of one of the oldest art forms in full-fledged interactive, performative events in Dia’s galleries and event spaces as well as out in the streets.

Located on the same block as Dia Chelsea and the institution’s administrative offices, this portion of 7000 Oaks consists of 38 living trees, each paired with a columnar basalt marker measuring four feet tall. Per Beuys’s original instructions, the basalt is imported from the same quarry that had supplied the Kassel manifestation.

In preparation for Documenta, Beuys arranged in early 1982 for basalt to be brought into Kassel from a quarry outside the city, which was then amassed on the front lawn of the Fridericianum, Documenta’s primary exhibition building. Beuys himself planted the first tree with its accompanying stele. Trees and stones were arranged according to site proposals submitted by residents, neighborhood councils, schools, local associations, and other groups. While the majority of the trees were oaks, 15 other species were incorporated. At the opening of Documenta 8 in June 1987, some 18 months after Beuys had died, the artist’s son, Wenzel, and widow, Eva, planted the last tree in Kassel, matching the nominal 7,000.

Around each of these issues, Group Material organizes a roundtable discussion (with guest speakers from various interest groups), an exhibition at 77 Wooster Street, and a town meeting at 155 Mercer Street. With its emphasis on collaborative production and public participation, the project takes democracy not only as its subject, but also as a working process and an exhibition model.

Adopting the moniker “Printed Matter Bookstore at Dia,” the organization retains its artistic autonomy and ultimately becomes the distributor for Dia’s nascent publications program in addition to curating a selection of artists’ books for the bookshop at Dia’s Chelsea exhibition space. In addition to sharing a location, the two organizations co-host a daylong symposium on developments in artists’ books and publishing. The symposium’s panelists include, among others, Barbara Bloom, AA Bronson, Bice Curiger, Raymond Foye, Dan Graham, Kathy Halbreich, Jenny Holzer, Mike Kelley, Richard Prince, and Lawrence Weiner, moderated by Clive Phillpot, director of the library at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

The project includes a large-scale architectural glass pavilion designed by Graham in collaboration with architects Mojdeh Baratloo and Clifton Balch. Constructed from a two-way mirrored glass, the walls of the pavilion shift between transparent and reflective states as the intensity of the daylight changes, creating complex visual effects with the sky, surrounding landscape, and interactions with people on the roof. The project also encompasses a small shed that is converted into a cafe and video-viewing room. The video program is organized in collaboration with Graham. 

Woodland scenery camouflages the walls, newspapers are collected in sagging stacks, and sinks endlessly spout water. The dizzying climate is both intriguing and disturbing, resembling a stage set caught between idyllic landscape and threatening enclosure. To accompany the exhibition, Dia publishes a book with texts by art critic Dave Hickey. 

Despite the closure of the Chelsea exhibition space in 2004, Dia’s educational outreach in New York continues through 2013, including an exhibition-responsive collaboration with the Hispanic Society of America; an after-school teen program in partnership with Safe Space, a drop-in center for unhoused LGBTQIA+ youth; and in-school K–12 residency programs in partnership with Abrons Arts Center serving schools in the Bronx and Manhattan. 

In 2001, a robust program of engagement is initiated in Beacon, New York, in anticipation of the opening of Dia Beacon in 2003. In partnership with the Beacon City School District, Dia’s educational programming in Beacon grows to serve audiences of all ages through school residencies, off-site community partnerships, year-round engagement for youth and young adults, and more.

Concurrent with revitalized exhibition programming at Dia Chelsea in 2015, educational programming is reintroduced in the city. In addition to weekly tours, Dia Chelsea offers an intensive out-of-school educational initiative for youth and young adults, realized in partnership with New York City’s Department of Youth and Community Development’s Learn & Earn program. In 2022, Dia launches Activations, a series of participatory, site-responsive, artist-led programs for all ages in collaboration with the Department of Parks and Recreation.

Fritsch explores the power of image and allegory through the physical manifestation of a rat-king, a term in literature and folklore that references a group of rodents in a circular formation with tails centrally intertwined. Their sheer size and matte-black color lift them from the realm of the banal to the iconic, which, in combination with their duplication and symmetry, creates an unsettling viewing experience.  

Stitched together in undulating swirls, this peculiar and fantastic hide creates a new topography. At a small metal table and a stool a seated figure methodically burns out the text of an old book with a soldering iron, releasing a steady stream of smoke that wisps up from the pages. Visitors are invited to traverse the space, engaging with the pelt as they navigate its irregularities. The site-specific installation is documented in a richly illustrated book that includes essays by Lynne Cooke (curator of the exhibition), Bruce Ferguson, Dave Hickey, and Marina Warner. 

As new commissions are produced annually until 2015, the Artist Web Projects’ diversity of artistic approaches and technical methods forms a rich cultural archive that traces the evolvement of internet art. Dia invites artists to create web projects that are independent of any other exhibitions or performances, often approaching those who work in other media and collaborating with them on bringing their concepts to the web, like Francis Alÿs in 1999 and Glenn Ligon in 2003.

In 2020, when Adobe Flash is phased out of internet browsers, Sara Tucker, director of IT and producer of the original Artist Web Projects, works with a programmer to convert all the projects to HTML 5, allowing the viewer to experience the artworks in a way that is most similar to how they would have interacted with the original pieces and also enabling iOS access. The series has been endowed with grants from six different foundations and received FIDIC Global Infrastructure and International Association of Art Critics awards.

Among the different genres of images are pictorial sources for the artist’s paintings, amateur family photographs, gestural and geometric abstractions, cityscapes, still-life studies, and layouts for installations. The ongoing project bears witness to Richter’s fascination with, and analysis of, contemporary languages of representation and their functions, as well as his examination of the role of photography in relation to the more traditional fine arts, especially painting.

In collaboration with Fondazione Prada and Flavin’s estate, in 1997 Dia completes the fluorescent-light installation designed by the artist, who passed away the year previous. Walking through the entryway, the chromatic succession of the nave, transept, and apse suggests the natural progression of light from night to dawn to day. Inside the church, the site-specific untitled (1996), with green, blue, pink, golden, and ultraviolet light, constitutes the sole source of illumination and permeates the entire space.  

This project showcases three of the first sculptures completed in a body of work that Serra has spent the past four years devising. Involving new methods of rolling steel, these large-scale artworks take the shaping of space rather than material as their primary subject. Shortly after the opening, a generous gift from Louise and Lenoard Riggio enables Dia to acquire the works, the institution’s first acquisition since 1984. With the opening of Dia Beacon in 2003, the Torqued Ellipses, along with a more recent work from Serra’s spirals, 2000 (2000)–also gifted by the Riggios–are presented in Dia Beacon’s inaugural exhibitions and remain on view today. 

Smithson created the sculpture starting in April 1970, with the assistance of a team operating dump trucks, a front loader, and a tractor. Over six thousand tons of black basalt rocks and earth were formed into a coil which winds counterclockwise into the lake. The artist chose the location due, in part, to the lake’s unusual physical qualities, including the reddish coloration of the water caused by bacteria and the crystallized salt deposits that form on the peninsula’s black basalt boulders of hardened lava (scattered remnants of the now extinct volcanoes in the area). The fractured rocky landscape and fluctuating water levels of the Great Salt Lake also appealed to the artist’s long-standing preoccupation with the chance operations of nature that lead to a state of transformation. Existing in a state of continual change, Spiral Jetty makes entropy visible and encourages visitors to repeatedly explore the work.

Installed at a time when water levels were particularly low, the artwork was submerged from 1972 onward, often visible only through photographic and film documentation. However, regional droughts 30 years later caused the lake to recede such that a salt-encrusted Spiral Jetty reappeared in 2002 for the first prolonged period in its history. The Great Salt Lake is now almost one mile away from the Spiral Jetty. In 2022, water levels reached a record-breaking low, prompting national coverage and discussion of the artwork as a barometer for the climate crisis.

Douglas presents an endlessly looping video work titled Win, Place or Show (1998), which takes as its point of departure the fundamental transformation of North American civic space in the 1960s: urban renewal, based in “slum clearance” and the relocation of entire communities to housing projects. Gordon's new work, left is right and right is wrong and left is wrong and right is right (1999), appropriates and deconstructs a little-known film made in 1949 by Hollywood director Otto Preminger titled Whirlpool, the stroboscopic effect mimicking the act of hypnosis on which the film’s plot turns. Juxtaposed, the two works, which both use dual projection, reveal surprising correspondences with one another, while simultaneously permitting each artist's singular concerns to emerge sharply. The exhibition is accompanied by a publication with essays by Dia curator Lynne Cooke, Sianne Ngai and Nancy Shaw, and Neville Wakefield.

The bookshop, with an independent entrance and expanded opening hours, focuses on postwar and contemporary art and culture, theory, history, and poetry, as well as video work courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix. To encourage visitors, the bookshop opens directly onto West 22nd Street with a new Pardo-created entrance characterized by open and inviting glass doors and windows, plus comfortable seating amid the books.

Starting in 2001 and to this day, each season artists are invited to give informal lectures, talks, or other presentations focused on an artist included in Dia’s collection or programming. Developed in the spirit of Dia’s mission, the series is motivated both by an in-depth focus on individual artists and a drive to facilitate new ideas and discourse across disciplines and generations.

The sound work was originally installed in 1977 but by 1992 was no longer active. In 2002, the effort to reinstate the work at its original site is initiated under the direction of gallerist Christine Burgin, and in partnership with the Times Square Alliance and the MTA Arts for Transit program. Following its completion, the work becomes a permanent Dia site. Today, under Dia’s stewardship, it is audible 24/7 and remains an ongoing interlocutor with the city’s mercurial topographies.

After four years of negotiation, starting in 1973, Neuhaus received permission from the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) and Consolidated Edison (Con Edison) to install equipment. As the MTA would not collaborate with a private individual, Neuhaus founded a nonprofit titled Hybrid Energies for Acoustic Resources (HEAR) to facilitate production. To construct the piece, Neuhaus climbed into a ventilation shaft beneath a street grate and installed a loudspeaker and homemade electronic sound generators. The internal subway voltage proved too high to power the work, and Con Edison refused to join a line to MTA property, forcing Neuhaus to hire an independent maintenance company to improvise a connection to a nearby streetlamp. The end result, completed in September 1977, was a subterranean tone audible on the street, a sound Neuhaus later likened to an “after ring of large bells.” The artist refused any public signage indicating the existence of the artwork so that Times Square would operate in total anonymity for the everyday New Yorker.

Dia later commissions Neuhaus to create a new sound work at Dia Beacon. Tailored to the building and its surrounding environment, Time Piece Beacon (2005) establishes a zone of sound around the perimeter of Dia’s facility and introduces an aural experience into the museum. As each hour approaches, a low tone gradually emerges, almost imperceptibly increasing in volume; the hour is signaled when the sound abruptly ends. Times Square and Time Piece Beacon are two of the three permanent installations by Neuhaus located in North America.

Defined as “the seat of emotions and passions,” spleen is the seminal concept informing the cycle of short video projections, based on a young woman named Manu. In this installation, Trockel’s continuing interest in the multifarious meanings of spleen is filtered through the feminist perspective at the heart of her practice. Five cantilevered walls, whose outer surfaces are armored in aluminum plates, delineate viewing areas within Dia’s 7,000-square-foot refurbished warehouse gallery, suffused in warm ambient light. On the obverse of each wall is a projection. The ghostly footage is suggestively, if indefinably, connected with the sheathed sculptural walls. Additionally, in the recesses of the space, two vitrines contain maquettes for unrealized books and catalogs. In her videos, Trockel creates unfamiliar characters with uncertain intentions, drawing on a constellation of emotions to provoke, sometimes humorously, unsettling questions about received notions of identity. Forswearing a foundation in what are deemed essentialist truths, the Spleen series contests pervasive stereotypes and archetypes that masquerade as unproblematic and unassailable reality. 

Dia Beacon belongs to Dia’s long tradition of renovating industrial warehouse spaces, rather than constructing new buildings, for the display of artworks. The site is chosen because of its expansive exhibition and storage space, its connection to New York’s West Chelsea neighborhood via the railway, and the region’s historical associations with the 19th-century landscape painters of the Hudson River School, who are an important reference point for several artists in the collection.

Built in 1929 by the National Biscuit Company (known as Nabisco since 1949), the former plant was originally designed by Nabisco’s staff architect Louis N. Wirshing Jr. and is a model of efficient, early 20th-century industrial architecture. The nearly 300,000-square-foot building features steel and concrete columns, reinforced maple and cement flooring—originally constructed to support heavy machinery—and soaring ceilings illuminated by clerestories and skylights. The bones of the building offer the ideal structure to house Dia’s growing collection of large, often heavy, installations, paintings, and sculptures.

Dia commissions the artist Robert Irwin and the architectural firm Open Office to redesign the rundown building and its grounds as a museum. Irwin determines that because Dia Beacon is located along the Metro-North Railroad and many visitors would be traveling from the city, for them the experience of the museum often starts at Grand Central Terminal—the departure point of the train. He envisions the museum as a “sequence of experiences” including riding the linear corridor of the train tracks up the Hudson River, descending into Dia Beacon’s forecourt garden, and entering the galleries.

Irwin’s interest in what he describes as “conditional” art or architecture—which has “no beginning, no middle, no end to it” but rather offers visitors a set of navigational choices while in the museum—closely aligns with Dia’s long-standing curatorial approach, which posits that each artist’s work should be seen on its own terms. As a result, each of Dia Beacon’s vast galleries is designed to present the work of one artist at a time. Rooted in Dia’s founding commitment to helping artists realize in-depth displays, the installations are designed in close collaboration with the artists whenever possible.

Exhibitions on view when Dia Beacon opens in 2003:

Bernd and Hilla Becher  
Joseph Beuys  
Louise Bourgeois*
John Chamberlain 
Hanne Darboven 
Walter De Maria   
Dan Flavin
Michael Heizer*
Robert Irwin*
Donald Judd*
On Kawara*
Imi Knoebel*
Louise Lawler*
Sol LeWitt*
Agnes Martin
Bruce Nauman
Blinky Palermo  
Gerhard Richter*
Robert Ryman*
Fred Sandback*
Richard Serra*
Robert Smithson*
Andy Warhol*
Lawrence Weiner*
Robert Whitman

*On view today

Martin’s retrospective begins in May 2004 with “. . . going forward into unknown territory . . .” Early Paintings 1957–67, which features works from when the artist lived in New York, followed by “. . . unknown territory . . .” Paintings from the 1960s. The third exhibition, To the Islands: Paintings 1974–79, explores the period when the artist resumed painting after a seven-year hiatus. The fourth installment is titled A Field of Vision: Paintings from the 1980s. The fifth and final installment, Homage to [a] Life: Paintings 1990–2004, presents some 20 paintings produced during the last decade of Martin’s oeuvre, bringing the retrospective to a close in November 2007. 

Jonas bases the commission on a lecture by German art historian Aby Warburg titled “Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians of North America,” which he presented in 1923 at Kreuzlingen Sanatorium in Switzerland where he was a patient. Using projections, objects, and photos, Jonas layers an extensive range of images, including ones of Albrecht Dürer’s engraving Melencolia I (1514), landscapes of the southwestern U.S., her own sketches, and photos of Dia Beacon’s lower level. Through this desynchronized collection, Jonas conjures a hallucinatory space with voice-overs, dance, drawing, and an original score by Moran.

The commission is reinstalled in the original gallery in 2021–23 as part of an exhibition of Jonas’s work.

Lê’s deep knowledge of the history of visual representations of both this region and industrial enterprise informs her approach to the subject matter—on the one hand renowned precursors such as the Hudson River School of landscape painters, and on the other a range of artists from the 1960s including Bernd and Hilla Becher and Robert Smithson. As replete with references to the industrial past as to artistic predecessors, Lê’s resonant portrayal highlights what is usually occluded in contemporary representations of the region. Lê envisions this veteran site in terms that go beyond the specifics of the strictly documentary, in search of what she deems “a larger understanding of history and culture.” 

Presented in two parts, on view September 2006–September 2007 and October 2007–September 2008, the exhibitions collectively displayed the evolving series of photographs as Lê returned to document the seasonal changes of the quarry in 2006–07. 

The exhibitions offer singular opportunities for visitors to encounter installations by living artists within the unique environment of the Hispanic Society’s collections, enabling a distinctive dialogue between contemporary art and the historical works housed in the Society’s complex. In keeping with Dia’s history of offering installations for long-term public viewing, each project is presented for an extended period. Dia also organizes Tuesdays on the Terrace, a series of outdoor public programs that feature dance, music, poetry, and more. 

Over the course of two years, the series of weeklong, seasonal residencies and performances takes place in the galleries devoted to work by John Chamberlain, Walter De Maria, Dan Flavin, Imi Knoebel, Bruce Nauman, Richard Serra, and Andy Warhol. During the site-specific Events viewers are invited to walk around the galleries and experience the performances from different vantage points. The choreography is accompanied by an original live score developed specifically for each Event.

While Knoebel created this monumental cycle in part to pay homage to a deceased friend, German painter Blinky Palermo, it nonetheless proved seminal; it is the fountainhead in the artist’s 30-year investigation into the multifarious and complex roles color may assume in a contemporary practice. Though the work was acquired by Dia shortly after its realization, this presentation (May 2008–March 2014) is the first time it is shown in North America. The artist himself installs the piece, determining the sequence and relation of the parts in response to the site.

On view from September 2008 to January 2011, Leonard’s work comprises some 4,000 vintage postcards of Niagara Falls, sourced mostly online over the preceding year. Rendered generic through decades of mass reproduction, these landscape motifs are emblematic of how culture transforms natural sites into tourist destinations; its imagery showing little evidence of change, the site maintains its iconic status. Leonard’s ensemble draws attention to the ways in which cultural conventions and artifacts have mapped and defined both the natural world and our understanding of it.

For Dia Beacon, Jeong A produces a new iteration of her work A Reality Upgrade & End Alone (2003/2010), composed of 5,000 rhinestones, that transforms the two-acre grass field behind the museum into an ephemeral, shimmering blanket.

At the Dan Flavin Art Institute, the artist presents a series of works on paper, Dr. Vogt (2010).  

For the east gallery of the Hispanic Society of America, the artist has created a sprawling installation that emerges out of her distinctive multidisciplinary approach to art making. The gathered works, although placed considerable distances from one another, establish an ensemble of visual and conceptual relationships in a cosmology of characters, materials, and forms.

The exhibition, curated by EAI executive director Lori Zippay, takes the organization’s founding year as its point of departure and presents a diverse series of media artworks linked by the alternative artistic practices and activist impulses that drove the early video subculture.

Constructed by residents of Forest Houses in the South Bronx in New York, the artwork takes the form of an outdoor structure comprised of numerous pavilions, including an exhibition space with historical photographs, personal objects that belonged to the philosopher, and an adjoining library holding 500 books by (and about) Gramsci.  

Gramsci Monument offers a daily program of lectures by philosopher Marcus Steinweg, a children’s workshop run by artist Lex Brown, a radio station, happy hour, and a daily newspaper. Weekly programs include a play titled Gramsci Theater, Gramsci seminars led by international scholars, poetry lectures and workshops led by poets and writers, art workshops led by Hirschhorn, open microphone events coordinated by the community, and field trips organized by the project’s “ambassador” and Dia curator Yasmil Raymond. As part of Gramsci Monument, Hirschhorn creates an online platform with texts, notes, pictures, and videos that document the process of the artwork from its earliest sketches. The website features live radio streaming and an archive of the project’s newspaper, and is updated daily with documentation of the events. 

The program takes place at Dia Beacon’s galleries and features the rarely seen Smiling (1967), an early conceptual duet; the first U.S. restaging of the solo work Bound (1982), performed by Slovenian dancer Jurij Konjar; and The Beast (2010), a solo, performed by Paxton himself, that is based on his research into movement for the spine.  

The series at Dia Beacon follows the performances of Night Stand (2004), a work by Paxton and long-time collaborator Lisa Nelson, presented at Dia Chelsea in October 2013. 

Commissions since 2015 include Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla’s Puerto Rican Light (Cueva Vientos) (2015), which began under director Philippe Vergne; occasions and other occurrences hosted by Isabel Lewis (2016); Rita McBride’s Particulates (2017); Joëlle Tuerlinckx’s THAT’S IT! (2018); Mel Bochner’s Measurement Room: No Vantage Point (2019); Carl Craig’s Party/After-Party (2020); Lucy Raven’s Ready Mix (2021) and Casters X-2 + Casters X-3 (2021); Camille Norment’s site-specific exhibition Plexus (2022); and Delcy Morelos’s Cielo terrenal (Earthly Heaven, 2023) and El abrazo (The Embrace, 2023), among others.

The installation marks the first formal exhibition at Dia Chelsea since 2004 and the beginning of Dia’s reengagement with a full exhibition and commissioning program in the city. Titled Dia 15 VI 13 545 West 22 Street Dream House (June–October 2015), the sound-and-light installation includes a new configuration of its traditional elements—Young’s sine-wave sound environment and Zazeela’s sculptures and light design—and incorporates Choi’s installation Ahata Anahata, Manifest Unmanifest IX. The program of concerts and performances includes ragas performed in the contemporary Kirana style in tribute to Pandit Pran Nath, and the U.S. premiere of Young’s full-length Trio for Strings (1958) performed by the artist’s Theatre of Eternal Music String Ensemble. 

A long-term, site-specific work (September 2015–January 2018), Puerto Rican Light (Cueva Vientos) reiterates the artists’ focus on creating spaces for dialogue between art and the deepest layers of the past, as well as their acute interest in exploring the realms of transmission, spectatorship, and the meaning of natural resources. Central to the work is a solar converter used to capture and store sunlight in Puerto Rico, providing a renewable energy source that powered Dan Flavin's Puerto Rican Light (to Jeanie Blake) (1965) for the duration of the installation. Developed by the artists over four years of research and collaboration with Dia, the project is organized with two regional partners, Museo de Arte de Ponce and Para la Naturaleza, the nonprofit unit of the Conservation Trust of Puerto Rico. Between 2015 and 2018, Para la Naturaleza provides escorted visits several days per week to allow small groups to encounter the artwork, integrating the journey to the site as part of the viewer's experience. 

Puerto Rican Light (Cueva Vientos) is Dia’s first long-term installation commissioned outside of the continental U.S. since Joseph Beuys’s 7000 Eichen (7000 Oaks) in 1982 and Walter De Maria’s The Vertical Earth Kilometer in 1977, both in Kassel, West Germany. The work extends Dia’s commitment to supporting works sited in the landscape and considers the sociopolitical meaning of the environment within a 21st-century context. 

In this exhibition (November 2016–July 2017), Suga responds to Dia Chelsea’s unique history as a marble-cutting facility by recreating Placement of Condition (1973/2016), his signature installation of cut stones that lean precariously away from each other while bound together with wire into a mutually dependent, stable network. The artist’s most recent installation, Law of Halted Space (2016), investigates material equilibrium through a series of interweaving metal rods that are perched on top of wooden uprights. These works are displayed alongside other historical and new installations that explore issues of balance and structure and respond to the physical parameters of the space.

Truitt’s first mature works are simple sculptural abstractions that evoke the vernacular architecture of her childhood home in Easton, Maryland. Drawing on her memories of fences, many of her early pieces take the form of painted, vertical panels or large, upright structures. Placed on the floor and scaled to the average viewer’s body, they invoke the syntax and scale of Minimalism, although her allusive subject matter and intuitive use of hand-applied color set her apart from other Minimalist artists. While others eschewed the subjectivity of Abstract Expressionism, Truitt harnessed its legacy to explore the transcendent potential of geometric abstraction. As she explained, “I have struggled all my life to get maximum meaning in the simplest possible form.”  

Presented at Dia’s exhibition spaces in Chelsea and Beacon, François Morellet (October 2017–June 2018) offers a focused exploration of the artist’s wide-ranging practice. The Dia Chelsea installation includes a large selection of early abstract geometric paintings, key examples from Morellet’s later series and neon works, and his first architectural integration, titled Trames 3°, 87°, 93°, 183° (Grids 3°, 87°, 93°, 183°) (1971/2017). Dia Beacon’s lower-level gallery features No End Neon (1990/2017), a site-specific work reconfigured for Dia’s upstate venue in close collaboration with the Morellet Estate in Cholet, France. This expansive installation—gifted to Dia by the Morellet family and Blain Southern, London and Berlin—allows visitors to encounter Morellet’s practice alongside major installations of work by his American and European peers represented in Dia’s permanent collection.

Holt began working on Sun Tunnels in 1973 while in Amarillo, Texas. As her ideas developed, she searched for a location in Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah. She was specifically looking for a “flat desert ringed by low mountains,” which she found in Utah. The following year, Holt purchased 40 acres of land in the Great Basin Desert. During the development of what would become Sun Tunnels, she worked with an astrophysicist and astronomer to consult on the dynamics of the work, as well as with several local contractors on its construction. It was completed in 1976.

Composed of four concrete cylinders, each 18 feet in length and 9 feet in diameter, Sun Tunnels is arranged in an open-cross format and aligned to frame the sun on the horizon during the summer and winter solstices. Additionally, each tunnel is perforated by a series of holes corresponding to stars in various constellations—Capricorn, Columba, Draco, and Perseus—so that the shadows cast by the sun through these small apertures, onto the internal surface of each tube, trace the earth’s rotation. The work centers Holt’s interest in perception and involves a focus on time—sculpting the sun’s light through the interplay of land and sky and celestial shifts from day to night. The acquisition starts a partnership among Dia in New York; the Center for Land Use Interpretation at Wendover, Utah; Holt/Smithson Foundation in Santa Fe; and the Utah Museum of Fine Arts in Salt Lake City, to further advocate for Sun Tunnels.

In conjunction with the acquisition, an exhibition of Holt’s work takes place at Dia Chelsea (September 2018–March 2019, accompanied by a series of public programs about the artist and her practice.

One gallery features an installation made from carbon paper, a material the artist began using in the early 1970s, which she would fold, press, and score against the wall, allowing marks to durationally “make themselves” as pigment was transferred to other surfaces. The other gallery presents works from Rockburne’s Golden Section Painting series, constructed from linen and coated in gesso and varnish, which she then cut and folded according to the mathematical ratio. Also on view are five of her Egyptian Paintings, a monochromatic series that employed new materials and incorporated her interest in the art of ancient Egypt. The long-term exhibition closes in November 2022.

Marking the most comprehensive exploration of the artist’s work since her death, the exhibition highlights the entirety of Posenenske’s intensely productive 12-year practice, before she turned away from making art to study the sociology of labor. The exhibition includes original prototypes for her sculptures as well as over 150 newly fabricated elements.

Craig reimagines the lower-level gallery and creates a sonic environment that is anchored to the site’s manufacturing history as a Nabisco box- and label-printing factory and recalls a techno tradition of reclaiming industrial spaces for radical experimentation. Deeply personal, the work accesses both the euphoria of the club environment and the loneliness that follows this collective experience. Opening on the eve of the COVID-19 pandemic, the exhibition Carl Craig: Party/After-Party (March 2020–July 2021) takes on new significance for visitors. The work is acquired by Dia in 2021.

The inaugural exhibition at the expanded Dia Chelsea presents newly commissioned works by Lucy Raven. In the first gallery, Casters X-2 + Casters X-3 (2021) is an installation of kinetic light sculptures that belongs to the artist’s ongoing Casters series, which she began in 2016. Ready Mix (2021) is an immersive installation featuring a 45-minute film shot over two years at a concrete plant in central Idaho. Together, these two projects explore properties of speed, pressure, and materiality (both geological and synthetic) in the context of the western U.S. Born in Arizona, Raven often considers the complex histories of this region’s formation and depiction, as well as its contemporary role in global commerce, communication, and development. In doing so, her work engages the legacy of the Land artists that Dia has supported since the early 1970s. Raven worked with Dia for three years to realize these large-scale installations, on view from April through December 2021. 

In dialogue with the contemporaneously emerging field of Postminimal art, Edwards’s barbed-wire sculptures explore geometry in suspension, while the material’s evocative referentiality—to a social, agricultural, and militaristic history of containment and bondage—ensures these works resist resolution. Four of these installations, three of which are in Dia’s permanent collection, are shown together for the first time, interrupting the architectural frame of Dia Beacon, provocatively delineating passageways and obstructing corners. 

These are presented alongside Duo Nesting Boxes (2021), a new diptych conceived for Dia that consists of layered panels of green and blue glass and references both the open-form autonomy of Bell’s standing walls and the geometry of his signature cubes. Seen in the naturally lit galleries designed by the artist’s friend and contemporary, Robert Irwin, the presentation offers insight into Bell’s unique and ground1Text — These are presented alongside Duo Nesting Boxes (2021), a new diptych conceived for Dia that consists of layered panels of green and blue glass and references both the open-form autonomy of Bell’s standing walls and the geometry of his signature cubes. Seen in the naturally lit galleries designed by the artist’s friend and contemporary, Robert Irwin, the presentation offers insight into Bell’s unique and groundbreaking understanding of the potential of glass as a medium. addexpandmore-dots TextbolditaliclinkundoredoThese are presented alongside Duo Nesting Boxes (2021), a new diptych conceived for Dia that consists of layered panels of green and blue glass and references both the open-form autonomy of Bell’s standing walls and the geometry of his signature cubes. Seen in the naturally lit galleries designed by the artist’s friend and contemporary, Robert Irwin, the presentation offers insight into Bell’s unique and groundbreaking understanding of the potential of glass as a medium. breaking understanding of the potential of glass as a medium. 

The extended caption for the artwork reads: 

Cameron Rowland 
Depreciation, 2018 
Restrictive covenant; 1 acre on Edisto Island, South Carolina 
Extended loan, Dia Art Foundation  

40 acres and a mule as reparations for slavery originates in General William Tecumseh Sherman’s Special Field Orders No. 15, issued on January 16, 1865. Sherman’s Field Order 15 was issued out of concern for a potential uprising of the thousands of ex-slaves who were following his army by the time it arrived in Savannah. [1]

The field order stipulated that “The islands from Charleston south, the abandoned rice fields along the rivers for thirty miles back from the sea, and the country bordering the St. Johns River, Florida, are reserved and set apart for the settlement of the negroes now made free by the acts of war and the Proclamation of the President of the United States. . . . Each family shall have a plot of not more than forty acres of tillable ground.” [2]  

This was followed by the formation of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands in March 1865. In the months immediately following the issue of the field orders, approximately 40,000 former slaves settled in the area designated by Sherman on the basis of possessory title. [3] 10,000 of these former slaves were settled on Edisto Island, South Carolina. [4]

In 1866, following Lincoln’s assassination, President Andrew Johnson effectively rescinded Field Order 15 by ordering these lands be returned to their previous Confederate owners. Former slaves were given the option to work for their former masters as sharecroppers or be evicted. If evicted, former slaves could be arrested for homelessness under vagrancy clauses of the Black Codes. Those who refused to leave and refused to sign sharecrop contracts were threatened with arrest. 

Although restoration of the land to the previous Confederate owners was slowed in some cases by court challenges filed by ex-slaves, nearly all the land settled was returned by the 1870s. As Eric Foner writes, “Johnson had in effect abrogated the Confiscation Act and unilaterally amended the law creating the [Freedmen’s] Bureau. The idea of a Freedmen’s Bureau actively promoting black landownership had come to an abrupt end.” [5] The Freedmen’s Bureau agents became primary proponents of labor contracts inducting former slaves into the sharecropping system. [6]  

Among the lands that were repossessed in 1866 by former Confederate owners was the Maxcy Place plantation. “A group of freed people were at Maxcy Place in January 1866. . . . The people contracted to work for the proprietor, but no contract or list of names has been found.” [7] 

The one-acre piece of land at 8060 Maxie Road, Edisto Island, South Carolina, was part of the Maxcy Place plantation. This land was purchased at market value on August 6, 2018, by 8060 Maxie Road, Inc., a nonprofit company formed for the sole purpose of buying this land and recording a restrictive covenant on its use. This covenant has as its explicit purpose the restriction of all development and use of the property by the owner. 

The property is now appraised at $0. By rendering it legally unusable, this restrictive covenant eliminates the market value of the land. These restrictions run with the land, regardless of the owner. As such, they will last indefinitely. 

As reparation, this covenant asks how land might exist outside of the legal-economic regime of property that was instituted by slavery and colonization. Rather than redistributing the property, the restriction imposed on 8060 Maxie Road’s status as valuable and transactable real estate asserts antagonism to the regime of property as a means of reparation. 

8060 Maxie Road is not for visitation. 

Notes 
1. Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877, updated ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1988; New York: HarperCollins, 2014), p. 71. 
2. Headquarters, Military Division of the Mississippi, Special Field Orders No. 15 (1865). 
3. Foner, Reconstruction, p. 71. 
4. Charles Spencer, Edisto Island 1861 to 2006: Ruin, Recovery and Rebirth (Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2008), p. 87. 
5. Foner, Reconstruction, p. 161. 
6. Foner, p. 161. 
7. Spencer, Edisto Island 1861 to 2006, p. 95. 

Made of everyday materials such as vinyl, water, nylon, and sand, Nengudi’s installations are at once proxies for bodies and sites for performance. The works accommodate a variety of cultural references, from African, Japanese, and South Asian rites to Western avant-garde art. The artist, born Sue Ellen Irons, has assumed pseudonyms that inflect her creative identities as sculptor (Senga Nengudi), painter (Harriet Chin), photographer (Propecia Leigh), and writer (Lily Bea Moor).

The long-term exhibition of Nengudi’s work at Dia Beacon (February 2023– ) includes sculptures and room-size installations from 1969 to 2020, and is accompanied by a performance program and publication, revealing the multiplicity of her practice. Performances at Dia Beacon and partnering venues activate and complement the sculptural presentation, and an artist’s book will collect, for the first time, Nengudi’s drawings, photographs, prints, poems, performance instructions, and other writings.

The commission also takes an expanded presence off-site, punctuating advertisements on the two 61-foot-tall Shinnecock Monument electronic billboards located along Sunrise Highway (also known as Highway 27). The billboards are operated by the Shinnecock Indian Nation and welcome many visitors arriving by car to Dia Bridgehampton. 

Each year, the prizewinner will be awarded $75,000 and receive the opportunity to present a public program at Dia. The award was made possible by a generous gift from the Sam Gilliam Foundation and Annie Gawlak, president of the foundation and Gilliam’s widow. In 2021, Dia made a historic acquisition of Double Merge (1968), an important room-size, suspended-canvas work by Gilliam, which the artist had rearranged in 2019 in response to the industrial-scale architecture of Dia Beacon. The establishment of this award continues Dia’s ongoing commitment to the artist’s legacy and the institution’s relationship with his estate. In March 2024, Ibrahim Mahama is announced as the first recipient of the award.

The exhibition at Dia Cheslea presents the full breadth of the artist’s dynamic oeuvre, including early works such as the enigmatic Cycladic Books series (1954–57) as well as numerous reliefs in plaster and metal that deftly capture the phenomenon of passing natural light. The newly restored The Gates to Times Square (1964–66) is displayed alongside works detailing Chryssa’s processes in realizing that monumental sculpture, her transitional pieces combining metal and neon, and examples of Studies for the Gates (1966–67). Following its New York premiere, the survey is presented at the Menil Collection, Houston, and at Wrightwood 659, Chicago.

Continuing its commitment to realizing artists’ visions, however ambitious in scale or scope, Dia presents long-term, often large-scale, single-artist presentations within its spaces. The contemporary commissioning program also continues, with artists whose work resonates with the original dedication to Minimal, Postminimal, and Conceptual art, producing new work year-after-year with Dia’s support.

Dia’s collection has grown significantly while maintaining a uniquely rich and multifaceted relationship with each artist. Up until the 1990s, Dia’s collection was focused on a small group of artists, but since then has expanded to represent a great breadth of artists who are formally and conceptually in conversation with those already in the collection. Artists who have recently entered Dia’s permanent collection include Larry Bell, stanley brouwn, Mary Corse, Melvin Edwards, Charles Gaines, Sam Gilliam, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Nancy Holt, Roni Horn, Joan Jonas, Rita McBride, Senga Nengudi, Charlotte Posenenske, Lucy Raven, Dorothea Rockburne, Anne Truitt, Lee Ufan, Meg Webster, and many more.  

Dia now also cares for more permanent sites, having acquired Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels (1973–76) in 2018 and established an indefinite loan of Cameron Rowland’s Depreciation (2018) in 2023. These long-term stewardships continue Dia’s founding mission of ensuring the legacy of work that, physically or conceptually, is beyond the scale and scope of the conventional gallery or museum model. 

The long-term presentation features Webster’s signature concave and convex volumes of soil, complemented by sculptures constructed in beeswax, moss, salt, and sticks. Presented in Dia Beacon’s west galleries, which border the Robert Irwin–designed garden, the exhibition’s organic materials comprise an ecosystem where color, scent, and sound enter in dialogue with the elements outside. Seen alongside works by her peers Donald Judd, Michael Heizer, and Richard Serra, among others, Webster’s sculptures bring a unique ecological perspective to the formal concerns that animate the art in Dia’s collection.