List of Dia Art Foundation locations and sites

A brick factory building, complete with smokestack, sits in the distance surrounded by a field and in front of hills covered in trees
The Dia Beacon building and surrounding landscape.

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]

  1. ^ Dia Archived 2017-10-26 at the Wayback Machine. Dia Art Foundation. Retrieved May 15, 2020.
  2. ^ Visit Our Locations & Sites. Dia Art Foundation. Retrieved May 19, 2023.
  3. ^ Freeman, Nate. The Dia Art Foundation will expand its Chelsea galleries and launch a new SoHo space. Archived 2020-09-04 at the Wayback Machine. Artsy. May 7, 2019. Retrieved May 15, 2020.
  4. ^ Admission to Dia's New York City Sites Will Soon Be Free Archived 2020-02-21 at the Wayback Machine. Artforum. September 19, 2019. Retrieved May 16, 2020.
  5. ^ Cite error: The named reference ABOUT was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  6. ^ a b Colacello, Bob. Remains of the Dia Archived 2018-09-12 at the Wayback Machine. Vanity Fair. April 30, 2008. Retrieved May 16, 2020.
  7. ^ a b c Goldstein, Andrew. Is It Time for a Land Art Renaissance? Jessica Morgan on Her Ambitious Vision for Dia in New York and Far, Far Beyond Archived 2020-01-28 at the Wayback Machine. ARTnews. May 17, 2019. Retrieved May 16, 2020.
  8. ^ a b c Cooke, Lynne and Govan, Michael. Dia Beacon. ISBN 0-944521-47-9. Dia Art Foundation. 2003. New York. p. 10-11.
  9. ^ a b c d Goldstein, Andrew. ‘There Were Women Working Then, Too’: How Dia Director Jessica Morgan Is Breaking Open the (Male) Canon of Postwar Art Archived 2019-08-24 at the Wayback Machine. ARTnews. May 15, 2019. Retrieved May 17, 2020.