There are twelve locations and sites which the Dia Art Foundation considers part of its constellation of art museums and long-term installations. [1] Dia breaks its holdings into two distinct categories: locations and sites. "Locations" include museum structures that contain galleries of smaller works either on permanent or temporary display, while "sites" are long-term art installations placed outside of the gallery context that have been either commissioned or acquired by Dia. All three locations are found in New York state, while the nine sites are located in New York, New Mexico, Utah, South Carolina, and Germany. [2] Currently one location, Dia SoHo, is scheduled to be opened in 2022, [3] [4] and there are nineteen sites that were once listed by Dia but are no longer listed.
The Dia Art Foundation was established in 1974 in New York City by the not yet married Heiner Friedrich and Schlumberger heiress Philippa de Menil, as well as Helen Winkler. They created the institution to help artists realize ambitious projects whose scale and scope is not feasible within the normal museum and gallery systems. [5] [6] With Friedrich and de Menil's combined large fortune, the foundation began supporting minimalist, conceptual, and land artists with, as Vanity Fair describes in an article, "stipends, studios, assistants, and archivists for the individual museums it planned to build for each of them". [6] Beginning with a collection of warehouse spaces in New York and outdoor spaces in the American West, the foundation did not focus on constructing true museums but focused on singular artistic visions. [7] This approach changed slightly in 1987 with the opening of Dia's first rotating exhibition space, the Dia Center for the Arts, now Dia Chelsea, on 22nd Street in New York City. [8] Dia Beacon, a former Nabisco box factory turned into a large-scale museum for the permanent collection, opened in 2003. [8] [9]
The foundation began by working with and collecting the work of only twelve artists: Joseph Beuys, 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. [8] [9] To this day the foundation owns works by less than 50 artists, but contains a breadth and depth of their work in a way other institutions do not have the resources to maintain. [7] Dia Director Jessica Morgan explains the relationship between Dia and its artists as, "I wouldn't use the word 'family', but these are people we're in communication with almost on a weekly basis, and in some cases we hold the vast majority of their seminal work". [7] Known for its focus on American male minimalist, experimental, and land artists from the 1960s and 1970s, Dia's focus has been changing to include other artists from the era, largely women and Japanese artists, since Morgan became curator in 2015. [9] This gradual refocus is markedly seen in the 2018 acquisition of Sun Tunnels by Nancy Holt, Dia's most recent addition to their list of sites. [9]
Dia maintains three locations all within New York State. These locations present galleries of work, either owned by or loaned to Dia, in temporary or permanent installations. [2] Dia Chelsea, the first Dia location, was known as the Dia Center for the Arts from its opening in 1987 through the opening of Dia Beacon in 2003. [8]
Location [2] | Placement | Year opened | Description | Ref. |
---|---|---|---|---|
Dia Beacon | Beacon, New York | 2003 | Dia's permanent collection is housed in this former Nabisco box printing factory with each gallery designed for the presentation of a single artist's work. | [10] |
Dia Bridgehampton | Bridgehampton, New York | 1979 building purchased by Dia, 1983 Dan Flavin Art Institute established 2020 renamed [lower-alpha 1] | Home of the Dan Flavin Art Institute, nine fluorescent light works by the artist on permanent display, the former fire house and church also has a gallery for rotating exhibitions. | [13] |
Dia Chelsea | New York City, New York | 1987, 2004 closed, 2015 moved and reopened, 2020 renovation and expansion | A collection of three former industrial buildings, architecturally connected during a 2020 renovation, which now hosts temporary exhibitions. | [14] [15] |
Dia lists nine sites in its catalogue. These sites include commissions, land art, long-term art installations not in a gallery context, and site-specific installations. While focused largely in New York City and the American West, there are sites also placed internationally and elsewhere in the United States. The first sites were a trio of acquisitions and commissions by Walter De Maria in 1977 and the most recently collected site is Depreciation by Cameron Rowland, on extended loan since 2023. [2]
Site [2] | Artist | Placement | Year | Year acquired | Description | Ref. |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
7000 Oaks | Joseph Beuys | New York City, New York | 1982 begun, 1988 NYC installation, 1996, 2020 expanded | 1988 | 38 trees each paired with a roughly four foot tall basalt stone. | [16] |
Depreciation | Cameron Rowland | Edisto Island, South Carolina | 2018 | 2023 [lower-alpha 2] | A restrictive covenant for 1 acre of land on the site of the former Maxcy Place plantation. The land was purchased at market value in 2018, but is now appraised at $0 due to the covenant. The land is not to be visited, but documentation is on long term display at Dia Chelsea. | [17] [18] |
Spiral Jetty | Robert Smithson | Great Salt Lake at Rozel Point, Box Elder County, Utah | 1970 | 1999 | A 1,500-foot-long (460 m) by 16-foot-wide (4.9 m) jetty made from six thousand tons of black basalt and soil from the area arranged in spiral. | [19] |
Sun Tunnels | Nancy Holt | Great Basin Desert, Utah | 1973-76 | 2018 | Four concrete cylinders, measuring eighteen feet long by nine feet in diameter, sitting in an open cross layout and arranged to line up with the sunset on solstice days. | [20] |
The Broken Kilometer | Walter De Maria | New York City, New York | 1979 | 1979 | A grid of 500 polished brass rods, with a total length of 3,280 feet, lying on the floor and illuminated with metal-halide stadium lights. | [21] |
The Lightning Field | Walter De Maria | Quemado New Mexico | 1977 | 1977 | 400 stainless steel poles standing upright to define a horizontal plane over a one mile by one kilometer area. | [22] |
The New York Earth Room | Walter De Maria | New York City, New York | 1977 | 1977 | A 3,600 square foot room filled with 250 cubic yards of soil to a depth of 22 inches. | [23] |
The Vertical Earth Kilometer | Walter De Maria | Kassel, Germany | 1977 | 1977 | A five centimeter wide, one kilometer long brass rod inserted vertically into the earth with its top flush to the ground. | [24] |
Times Square | Max Neuhaus | New York City, New York | 1977, 2002 reinstalled | 2002 | Sound emanating from a grate in Times Square on a triangular pedestrian island between 45th and 46th streets. | [25] |
There are multiple Dia locations, sites, or long term installations, that were once listed in Dia publications or press releases but are no longer categorized as such. These sites were not necessarily removed from view, for instance The Dan Flavin Art Institute became part of Dia Bridgehampton [13] and Dan Flavin's Untitled (to you, Heiner, with admiration and affection) was moved from Munich, Germany to Dia Beacon. [26] To be included in this list the location or site either is listed in the "Time Line of Locations and Sites" found in the 2021 book An Introduction to Dia's Locations and Sites edited by Kamilah N. Foreman, Matilde Guidelli-Guidi, and Sophia Larigakis, or are mentioned in a Dia press release where the locations and sites of that time are listed.
Site | Artist | Placement | Year Opened | Year removed from view | Description | Ref. |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Untitled in pink, green, and blue fluorescent light | Dan Flavin | Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel, Switzerland | 1975 | Still on view | This permanent, outdoor, fluorescent light installation was installed by Dia and gifted to the Kunstmuseum. | [27] |
Dream Festival | La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela | New York City, New York | 1975 | 1979 | Dia gave Young and Zazeela a ten-year commission to produce this festival. presented within Dream House environment, the festival presented the American premier of Young's The Well-Tuned Piano as well as performances by the Theatre of Eternal Music and Pandit Pran Nath.The festival moved to a dedicated Dream House space in 1979 considered a different site. | [27] |
Untitled | Dan Flavin | New York City, New York | 1976 | 1987 | For the Whitney Museum of American Art's exhibit 200 years of American Sculpture, Flavin conceived of a long-term fluorescent light installation on a train platform at Grand Central Terminal. The work was beyond the scope of the Whitney exhibition and was instead realized through the support of Dia. | [27] |
Dia Cologne | Various Artists | Cologne, Germany | 1980 | 1983 | A gallery run by Dia in Cologne, Germany. It presented exhibitions of works by Blinky Palermo, Lucio Fontana, and Imi Knoebel. Donations for Joseph Beuys' 7000 Eichen , presented at documenta 7 in 1982, were coordinated by Dia here. | [27] |
Dream House | La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela | New York City, New York | 1979 | 1985 | This rendition of Dream House stretched over 6 floors and had more than 20 staff members. Located at the former New York Mercantile Exchange building it closed due to the loss of Dia funding following the 1980s oil glut. Installed in 1979, the installation is not opened to the public until 1981. Dia later helped fund another, smaller, rendition of the work in TriBeCa. | [27] [28] [29] |
Masjid al-Farah | Sheikh Muzaffer Ozak, Dan Flavin | New York City, New York | 1981 | 1985 | A sufi mosque established by Dia and Sheikh Muzaffer Ozak of the Halveti-Jerrahi Order of Dervishes. In 1982, Dia commissioned, and installed throughout the mosque, a series of untitled light works by Dan Flavin. | [27] |
Fred Sandback Museum | Fred Sandback | Winchendon, Massachusetts | 1981 | 1996 | A former bank building housing works by Sanback was opened by Dia in 1981 and closed in 1996 by the artist. | [27] [30] [31] |
Dia SoHo | Various Artists | New York City, New York | 1982 | 1989 | Originally opened in 1982 by Dia as a long-term exhibition space for paintings by Barnett Newman, the gallery has been rented as a retail space since 1989. Located at 77 Wooster Street, there were plans in place to reopen the building as a 2,500-square-foot gallery for changing exhibitions. Those plans have not yet been achieved. | [3] [27] |
Chamberlain Gardens | John Chamberlain | Essex, Connecticut | 1982 | 1984 | At Chamberlain's former outdoor studio, Dia maintained a ten-acre garden with installations of his work throughout. | [27] |
John Chamberlain: Sculpture, An Extended Exhibition | John Chamberlain | New York City, New York | 1982 | 1985 | At Chamberlain's former Tribeca studio, Dia presented rotating exhibitions of his work. | [27] |
Dan Flavin Art Institute | Dan Flavin | Bridgehampton, New York | 1979 building purchased by Dia, 1983 Dan Flavin Art Institute established | Still on view | The Dan Flavin Art Institute, nine works by the artist on permanent display, now constitutes part of Dia Bridgehampton. | [27] [32] [13] |
155 Mercer Street | Various artists | New York City, New York | 1986 | 1996 | Space used for programing, particularly rehearsal and performance space for modern choreographers. | [27] |
Flavin at Chiesa Rossa | Dan Flavin | Milan, Italy | 1996 | Still on view | Dia worked with the estate of Dan Flavin and Fondazione Prada to install this fluorescent light workin the church Santa Maria Annunciata in Chiesa Rossa. Flavin died the same year as it was installed. | [27] |
Beacon Point | George Trakas | Beacon, New York | 1999 initiated, 2001 site clean-up 2007 artwork inaugurated | Still on view | Water access area designed as an artwork including an angling deck, boardwalk, and bulkhead created in collaboration with Scenic Hudson and Minetta Brook. | [27] [33] [32] |
Dia at the Hispanic Society of America | Various artists | New York City, New York | 2007 | 2011 | Dia presented a series of rotating commissions at the Hispanic society including works by Francis Alÿs, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, and Koo Jeong A. | [27] |
Gramsci Monument | Thomas Hirschhorn | New York City, New York | 2013 | 2013 | Installed for just one summer at Forest Houses, a New York City Housing Authority development, numerous pavilions were built including an exhibition space, a library, a stage, an art workshop, computer terminals, and a restaurant all managed by local residents. | [27] |
Puerto Rican Light (Cueva Vientos) | Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla | Between Guayanilla and Peñuelas, Puerto Rico | 2015 | 2018 | The artists placed Puerto Rican Light (to Jeanie Blake), a 1965 fluorescent light sculpture by Dan Flavin, in a cave in the Puerto Rican jungle which can only be accessed by hiking approximately 2 hours to it, and powered it with the use of solar panels. | [27] [34] [35] [32] |
Rooftop Urban Park Project | Dan Graham | New York City, New York | 1981-1991 elements created, 1991 on view as composed whole | 2004 | located on the roof of the Dia:Chelsea galleries, Graham placed a small urban park containing a pavilion created out of one-way glass, named Two-Way Mirror Cylinder Inside Cube, and a shed for viewing video art. | [36] [37] |
Untitled | Dan Flavin | New York City, New York | 1996 | Disappears from Dia press releases between February 7, 2017 [38] and February 24, 2017. [39] | Flavin's last artwork using fluorescent light, this site-specific installation was in the two stairwells of Dia's former headquarters at 548 West 22nd Street and is no longer on view. | [40] |
Untitled (to you, Heiner, with admiration and affection) | Dan Flavin | Munich, Germany | 1973 | Disappears from Dia press releases between May 18, 2015 [41] and July 17, 2015. [42] | 58 four foot by four foot sculptures made of metal and fluorescent light fixtures. Now installed at Dia Beacon. | [43] |
Alongside the 12 locations and sites Dia manages, they also maintain relationships with 6 affiliate institutions. Dia collaborated and supported these institutions, either financially or by donating or sharing of artworks, early in each organization's development. One of the affiliates, Roden Crater by James Turrell, while being partially funded and supported by Dia since the 70's, is still not completed. [5]
Site [5] | Artist | Placement | Year | Description | Ref. |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Andy Warhol Museum | Andy Warhol | Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania | 1989 announced, 1994 museum opened | Built in collaboration with the Carnegie Institute and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts as one of the four Carnegie Museums, the museum holds the world's largest collection of art and archival items related to Warhol. | [5] [44] |
Chinati Foundation | Various | Marfa, Texas | 1978 | Began as a collection of works by Donald Judd installed with the help of Dia. | [5] [45] |
City | Michael Heizer | Garden Valley, Nevada | 1972 begun, 2022 opened | A one and a quarter mile long by one quarter of a mile wide land art piece partially funded by Dia. | [5] [46] [47] |
Cy Twombly Gallery | Cy Twombly | Houston, Texas | 1994 | An installation of Twombly's work built in collaboration with the Menil Collection. | [5] [48] |
Dream House | La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela | New York City, New York | 1993 | A sound and light installation which Dia helped fund the installation of. | [5] [49] |
Roden Crater | James Turrell | Painted Desert, Arizona | 1977 land acquired not yet completed | A large-scale multi-room installation focused on experiencing light located inside an extinct volcanic Cinder cone funded with support by Dia. | [5] [50] |
Dan Flavin was an American minimalist artist famous for creating sculptural objects and installations from commercially available fluorescent light fixtures.
Donald Clarence Judd was an American artist associated with minimalism. In his work, Judd sought autonomy and clarity for the constructed object and the space created by it, ultimately achieving a rigorously democratic presentation without compositional hierarchy. He is generally considered the leading international exponent of "minimalism", and its most important theoretician through such writings as "Specific Objects" (1964). Judd voiced his unorthodox perception of minimalism in Arts Yearbook 8, where he says, "The new three dimensional work doesn't constitute a movement, school, or style. The common aspects are too general and too little common to define a movement. The differences are greater than the similarities."
Robert Walter Irwin was an American installation artist who explored perception and the conditional in art, often through site-specific, architectural interventions that alter the physical, sensory and temporal experience of space.
Max Neuhaus was an American musician, composer and artist who was a noted interpreter of contemporary and experimental percussion music in the 1960s. He went on to create numerous permanent and short-term sound installations in the four decades that followed.
Dia Art Foundation is a nonprofit organization that initiates, supports, presents, and preserves art projects. It was established in 1974 by Philippa de Menil, the daughter of Houston arts patron Dominique de Menil and an heiress to the Schlumberger oil exploration fortune; art dealer Heiner Friedrich, Philippa's husband; and Helen Winkler, a Houston art historian. Dia provides support to projects "whose nature or scale would preclude other funding sources."
John Angus Chamberlain, was an American sculptor and filmmaker. At the time of his death he resided and worked on Shelter Island, New York.
The Menil Collection, located in Houston, Texas, refers either to a museum that houses the art collection of founders John de Menil and Dominique de Menil, or to the collection itself of paintings, sculptures, prints, drawings, photographs and rare books.
Joan Jonas is an American visual artist and a pioneer of video and performance art, "a central figure in the performance art movement of the late 1960s". Jonas' projects and experiments were influential in the creation of video performance art as a medium. Her influences also extended to conceptual art, theatre, performance art and other visual media. She lives and works in New York and Nova Scotia, Canada.
Dia Beacon is the museum for the Dia Art Foundation's collection of art from the 1960s to the present and is one of the 12 locations and sites they manage. The museum, which opened in 2003, is situated near the banks of the Hudson River in Beacon, New York. Dia Beacon's facility, the Riggio Galleries, is a former Nabisco box-printing facility that was renovated by Dia with artist Robert Irwin and architects Alan Koch, Lyn Rice, Galia Solomonoff, and Linda Taalman, then of OpenOffice. Along with Dia's permanent collection, Dia Beacon also presents temporary exhibitions, as well as public programs designed to complement the collection and exhibitions, including monthly Gallery Talks, Merce Cunningham Dance Company Events, Community Free Days for neighboring counties, and an education program that serves area students at all levels. With 160,000 square feet (15,000 m2), it is one of the largest exhibition spaces in the country for modern and contemporary art.
Marian Zazeela was an American light artist, designer, calligrapher, painter, and musician based in New York City. She was a member of the 1960s experimental music collective Theatre of Eternal Music, and was known for her collaborative work with her husband, the minimalist composer La Monte Young.
The Chinati Foundation/La Fundación Chinati is a contemporary art museum located in Marfa, Texas, and based upon the ideas of its founder, artist Donald Judd.
Gluckman Tang Architects,, is a New York City–based architecture firm providing services in architecture, planning, and interior design. Established by Richard Gluckman in 1977, the firm focuses on a minimalist design approach.
Hanne Darboven was a German conceptual artist, best known for her large-scale minimalist installations consisting of handwritten tables of numbers.
Leslie Hewitt is an American contemporary visual artist.
Heiner Friedrich is an art dealer and collector of minimal art and conceptual art. Friedrich and his then wife Philippa de Menil, together with Helen Winkler, established the Dia Art Foundation in 1973. Friedrich has exhibited works by Blinky Palermo, Walter De Maria, Donald Judd, La Monte Young, Andy Warhol, Michael Heizer, and Joseph Beuys, among others in his galleries in Germany, but became less interested in short term gallery installations and through Dia began to collect, and support major projects, such as Walter De Maria's The Lightning Field (1977) in New Mexico and purchasing a former military base in Marfa, Texas to enable Donald Judd to create a permanent space for the installation of his large minimal sculptures.
Cameron Rowland is an American conceptual artist whose work has been exhibited internationally and acclaimed for its structural analytic approach to addressing issues of American slavery, mass incarceration, and reparations. Rowland graduated from Wesleyan University in 2011 and they were awarded the MacArthur Fellowship in 2019 after several solo and group exhibitions at venues including the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Kunsthal Aarhus, and La Biennale de Montreal. Rowland is noted for their distinct method of loaning some works to collectors and institutions rather than selling them outright, an approach meant to mirror the experience of low-income people shopping at rent-to-own stores like Rent-A-Center and disrupt the traditional value structure in the contemporary art market.
Dia Bridgehampton, previously known as the Dan Flavin Art Institute, is a museum in Bridgehampton, New York run by the Dia Art Foundation. Originally built in 1909 as a firehouse, the building was sold to the First Baptist Church of Bridgehampton in 1924. The church renovated and expanded the building in 1947 and used it as a place of worship through the mid-1970s. The congregation grew and, in 1979, they sold the building to the Dia Art Foundation. Dia renovated the building into a single-artist museum for Dan Flavin as well as a rotating exhibition space. The building re-opened in 1983 as the Dan Flavin Art Institute.
Untitled (In memory of Urs Graf), also called Untitled in pink, green, and blue fluorescent light by the Dia Art Foundation, is an art installation by Dan Flavin at Kunstmuseum Basel. Untitled (In memory of Urs Graf) consists of eleven fluorescent light units in each of the four corners of the front courtyard of Kunstmuseum Basel and two units in each of the four corners of the arcade gallery. Each unit is 120 centimetres (47 in) long and each grouping is a different color, either pink, yellow, green or blue. The units completely fill the corners stretching from the ground to the top of the balcony parapet. Conceived of in 1972, the installation was installed in 1975. This permanent, outdoor, installation was funded and installed by the Dia Art Foundation as its first major public work. It was subsequently gifted to the Kunstmuseum in 1980.
Dia Chelsea is an art museum in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York City and is operated by Dia Art Foundation. Opened in 1987 at 548 West 22nd Street as the Dia Center for the Arts, Dia Chelsea has since moved across the street to a series of connected buildings now consolidated at 537 West 22nd Street. It is one of the locations and sites the Dia Art Foundation manages. The Museum hosts longterm but temporary exhibitions dedicated to one or two artists at a time as well as associated artistic and educational programing.