USA 2007

DIA Beacon, un lieu extraordinaire à 100 Km de Manhattan: le "grand" art contemporain dans toutes les assertions du mot.
Présentation:

Dia Art Foundation

"Over the past thirty years, Dia Art Foundation has become internationally recognized as one of the world’s most influential contemporary art institutions.

Dia’s permanent holdings include pivotal artworks by major artists who came to prominence during the 1960s and 1970s, including Joseph Beuys, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Agnes Martin, and Andy Warhol. The art of this period represented a radical departure in practice—unlike any witnessed since the birth of modernism. Often large scale, the work was also occasionally ephemeral or site specific. The name “Dia,” taken from the Greek word meaning “through,” was chosen to suggest the institution’s role in enabling extraordinary artistic projects that might not otherwise be realized.

Heiner Friedrich and Philippa de Menil, who founded Dia in 1974, wished to extend the boundaries of the modern museum in order to respond to the specific requirements of a few of the most ambitious and promising artists of this generation. Today, Dia continues to commission, support, and present site-specific installations and long-term exhibitions of work by these artists, as well as by younger ones whose work reflects that of the older generation.

In addition to holding one of the world’s foremost collections of work by artists of the 1960s and 1970s, now on view at Dia:Beacon, Riggio Galleries, Dia’s museum in New York’s Hudson Valley, Dia maintains long-term site-specific projects in the western United States, New York City, and elsewhere, and a museum for temporary exhibitions and public programming in New York City (currently closed for renovations).

Permanent Collection
During its first ten years, thanks to the generosity of its founders, Dia assembled a permanent collection of unparalleled depth of the work of a select group of artists. Among those whose work was commissioned and collected at that time are Beuys, John Chamberlain, Walter De Maria, Flavin, Judd, Imi Knoebel, Blinky Palermo, Fred Sandback, Cy Twombly, Warhol, Robert Whitman, and La Monte Young.

In anticipation of the opening of Dia:Beacon, Dia augmented its core collection with focused acquisitions. The first of these was made in 1997, when Board Chairman Leonard Riggio and his family renewed Dia’s commitment to augmenting its permanent collection with their gift of three sculptures from the Torqued Ellipses series (1996–97) by Richard Serra. With generous support from the Lannan Foundation, the artists themselves, and others, the collection has been further enriched with gifts, purchases, and long-term loans of works by other artists from that same generation—Bernd and Hilla Becher, Louise Bourgeois, Hanne Darboven, Michael Heizer, Robert Irwin, On Kawara, Sol LeWitt, Agnes Martin, Bruce Nauman, Gerhard Richter, Robert Ryman, Robert Smithson, and Lawrence Weiner—as well as additional works by artists already represented. Toward this end, a major contribution from the Brown Foundation enabled Dia to purchase a monumental untitled sculpture by Judd, dating from 1976.

Dia:Beacon, Riggio Galleries
Dia was a pioneer in converting large industrial buildings for the installation of contemporary art—a practice now widely used by museums internationally. Dia’s latest such conversion, its museum in Beacon, is located in a former printing plant built in 1929 by Nabisco (National Biscuit Company). With 240,000 square feet of exhibition space, the museum is sited on thirty-one acres on the banks of the Hudson River, and is adjacent to ninety acres of riverfront parkland. It is a five-minute walk from the Metro-North train station in Beacon, sixty miles (or eighty minutes travel time) north of New York City.

Dia:Beacon’s expansive spaces are uniquely suited to the needs of large-scale installations, paintings, and sculptures. In keeping with Dia’s history of single-artist, site-related presentations each gallery in the museum was designed specifically for the art it contains. This includes Warhol’s 1978-79 multipart work Shadows, displayed in a single installation measuring approximately 350 linear feet; two of Beuys’s mixed-media installations, Arena—dove sarei arrivato se fossi stato intelligente! (Arena—where would I have got if I had been intelligent!), 1970-72, and Aus Berlin: Neues vom Kojoten (From Berlin: News from the Coyote), 1979, together with several of his Fonds (1979); Darboven’s monumental Kulturgeschichte 1880–1983 (Cultural History 1880–1983), 1980–83 (note: this work is currently deinstalled for conservation); De Maria’s multipart stainless steel sculpture The Equal Area Series (1976–77); selections from Flavin’s series of fluorescent light “monuments” to V. Tatlin (1964–81); and Heizer’s North, East, South, West (1967/2002), among others. The reflected north light from more than 34,000 square feet of skylights creates ideal viewing conditions, evidenced in the galleries devoted to the paintings of Kawara, Martin, Palermo, and Ryman.

Dia collaborated with American artist Robert Irwin and architect OpenOffice to formulate the plan for the museum building and its exterior setting and grounds. The plan includes an entrance court and parking lot with a grove of flowering fruit trees and a formal garden, both of which were designed by Irwin.

Dia’s New York City exhibition program
Dia’s exhibition program in New York City began in 1987, with the opening of a four-story converted warehouse on West 22nd Street in New York City. In keeping with Dia’s mandate, the New York City exhibitions focus on individual artists, typically offering an artist an entire floor on which to develop a new project or create a focused presentation of existing work. The exhibitions are on view for approximately one year to allow extended viewing.

Among the many artists who have created site-specific projects for Dia exhibitions are Robert Gober, Ann Hamilton, Jenny Holzer, Pierre Huyghe, Robert Irwin, Juan Muñoz, Jorge Pardo, Jessica Stockholder, Diana Thater, and Lawrence Weiner. Others, including On Kawara, Bridget Riley, Robert Ryman, and Robert Whitman have presented existing work in focused installations that respond to Dia’s mandate and site.

Long-term and Affiliated Projects
Among the long-term sited projects that Dia initially supported and maintains are works by De Maria, including The Lightning Field (1977), near Quemado, New Mexico, and The New York Earth Room (1977) and The Broken Kilometer (1979), in New York City. In addition, Dia maintains the Dan Flavin Art Institute, an installation of works by Flavin in Bridgehampton, New York. The installation of work by Judd and Chamberlain, in Marfa, Texas, was begun by Judd with Dia’s assistance in the late 1970s and is now operated by the Chinati Foundation with support from Dia. Dream House, a sound and light installation by Young and Marian Zazeela, located in New York City, was also initiated with Dia’s support in the late 1970s.

Since 1987, Dia has sited several long-term projects in New York City. Beuys’s 7000 Eichen (7000 Oaks), an installation of trees paired with basalt columns along West 22nd Street, continues a project the artist began with Dia’s sponsorship at Documenta 7 in Kassel, Germany, in 1982. Also at the New York City exhibition facility are Dan Graham’s Rooftop Urban Park Project, a small-scale park and video café realized in 1991, and an untitled work in fluorescent light in the museum’s stairwells devised by Flavin just prior to his death in 1996.

In 1999, Dia acquired Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970), Great Salt Lake, Utah, as a gift from the estate of the artist. Max Neuhaus’s Times Square, a soundwork installed on a pedestrian island in Times Square in New York City became part of Dia’s collection in 2002. Originally created in 1977, it was decommissioned in 1992 and has been recently reactivated. In addition, Dia currently supports the continuing development of Heizer’s long-term work City, in eastern Nevada, and James Turrell’s Roden Crater project in the Painted Desert in Arizona, which was begun in the 1970s with Dia’s support. Dia has also collaborated with other organizations in realizing long-term projects, including The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh (opened in 1994), and the Cy Twombly Gallery, Houston (opened 1995), which were created in part with gifts from Dia’s permanent collection.

Artists’ Projects for the Web
In 1995, as part of its efforts to explore new sites for the presentation of contemporary art, Dia initiated a series of internet commissions, thereby becoming one of the first arts organizations to foster artists’ use of the world wide web as a medium. Dia’s collection of web projects, which is available on Dia’s website at www.diaart.org, includes works by Francis Alÿs, David Claerbout, Diller + Scofidio, Molissa Fenley, Susan Hiller, Glenn Ligon, Komar & Melamid, Feng Mengbo, Allen Ruppersberg, Shimabuku, Gary Simmons, Stephen Vitiello, and others.

Public Programs
Dia’s public programs are integral to its efforts to make the arts of our time accessible to a broad and diverse audience. Programs in New York City include the Artists on Artists lecture series, which focus on the work of artists in Dia’s collection and exhibition programs; film and video screenings; and performances.

Programming at Dia:Beacon includes a series of year-long temporary exhibitions as well as public programs designed to complement the collection and exhibitions, including monthly Gallery Talks that take place in the museum’s galleries; music performances by St. Luke’s Chamber Ensemble; Readings in Contemporary Literature, a series of literary readings; and Community Free Days for neighboring counties. Since 2001, Dia has worked with the Beacon City Schools to develop an Arts Education Program that serves area students at all education levels, making Dia’s collection a valuable resource to area students and their teachers and families.

Dia’s publication program produces books in conjunction with selected exhibitions, scholarly volumes on the permanent collection, anthologies of the Lehman lectures and other program-related publications, audio works on CD, and multimedia works. "



© 1995-2007 Dia Art Foundation