To celebrate the anniversary, Dia Beacon will host a Community Day. There will be a variety of programming in the gallery spaces, outdoors, and in the Learning Lab. Events include guided tours, hands-on activities, artists’ talks, and more. The day will end with a happy hour on the front lawn.

Admission to the museum and all activities is free. 

For more details, view event page here.

Architecture

Built in 1929 by Nabisco, the nearly 300,000-square-foot factory building is composed of brick, steel, concrete, and glass and is considered a landmark of early-twentieth-century industrial architecture. It stands as a symbol of Beacon’s past as a major industrial and manufacturing city. 

The original building had many key design elements that made it an appealing site for contemporary art, including broad spans between supporting columns and more than 34,000-square-feet of skylights. Today these skylights provide natural light in the galleries and have uniquely established Dia Beacon as a “daylight museum.”

Dia invited artist Robert Irwin to conceive the master plan for a twenty-first-century museum that retained the original character of the factory’s interior spaces. Irwin also designed seasonally changing gardens throughout the surrounding landscape. Following the renovation, Dia Beacon was added to the National Register of Historic Places.

Art and Programs

In keeping with Dia’s history of single-artist, site-related presentations, each gallery was designed specifically for the installation of one artist’s work. This attentiveness to the work becomes tangible when visitors traverse the spaces at Dia Beacon, which were renovated to display, for example, Dan Flavin’s “monuments” for V. Tatlin (1964–90), Richard Serra’s Torqued Ellipses (1996–2000), and Michael Heizer’s North, East, South, West (1967/2002).

Dia’s collections and special presentations are supplemented by public programs, tours, and an arts education partnership with the City of Beacon, underway since 2001.