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Dia Announces 2022 Exhibition Schedule Across Dia Beacon, Dia Bridgehampton, and Dia Chelsea

Highlights of the Upcoming Program Include:

  • An exhibition of newly commissioned, site-specific installations by Camille Norment at Dia Chelsea
  • A major exhibition of Jack Whitten’s Greek Alphabet paintings at Dia Beacon—the first-ever devoted to this series
  • New sculptural work and musical scores by Leslie Hewitt on view at Dia Bridgehampton, accompanied by a series of events in collaboration with musicians at Dia Bridgehampton and Dia Chelsea
  • Three exhibitions at Dia Beacon of artists whose work has recently entered Dia’s permanent collection: Larry Bell, Melvin Edwards, and Jo Baer
  • The expansion of an Artist Web Project by Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, publishing the artists’ collection of online recordings from Palestine, Iraq, and Syria

New York, NY, December 21, 2021 – Today Dia announced its exhibition program for 2022 across its three primary exhibition spaces: Dia Beacon, Dia Bridgehampton, and Dia Chelsea. These include the second exhibition at the renovated Dia Chelsea, a new commission by the artist Camille Norment; four new exhibitions at Dia Beacon of work by Larry Bell, Jo Baer, Melvin Edwards, and Jack Whitten, as well as the reinstallation of influential works from the collection by Blinky Palermo, Robert Irwin, and Lawrence Weiner; and a new exhibition of work by Leslie Hewitt at Dia Bridgehampton.

“Our upcoming exhibitions in 2022 highlight a series of major recent acquisitions to Dia’s permanent collection, including work by Jo Baer, Larry Bell, Melvin Edwards, and Robert Irwin. Bringing these into the collection has expanded our holdings of work by artists historically at the core of Dia’s work, as well as broadening the narrative of this period of art history,” said Jessica Morgan, Dia’s Nathalie de Gunzburg director. “We are also developing our program of contemporary commissions, working with artists who extend the intellectual threads of Minimal, Postminimal, and Conceptual art of the 1960s and 1970s into the present day. We look forward to welcoming the public to our galleries in the coming year.”

In March, Dia Chelsea opens its second exhibition since the comprehensive renovation project to its galleries that culminated in 2021. This new, site-specific commission from Camille Norment takes over both large spaces at Dia Chelsea and engages with the social and industrial history of the site through interactive sonic installations.

The program of exhibitions at Dia Beacon begins in March with a presentation that brings together early sculptures by Larry Bell with a new sculptural diptych created by the artist for this presentation. In April, a display of early paintings by Jo Baer—recently added to Dia’s permanent collection—opens on long-term view. Three previously unrealized, barbed-wire installations from 1969 to 1970 by Melvin Edwards, also recently acquired by Dia, go on view in May. Over the course of three months in summer 2022, collection displays of iconic work by Blinky Palermo, Robert Irwin, and Lawrence Weiner will open, including a major, recently acquired work by Irwin. In November, the first-ever exhibition to focus on Jack Whitten’s Greek Alphabet paintings, realized between 1975–78, sheds light on a pivotal moment of experimentation in the artist’s career.

Opening in June at Dia Bridgehampton, a yearlong exhibition by Leslie Hewitt will feature newly commissioned sculptures and original scores composed in collaboration with artist Jamal Cyrus.

Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme work collaboratively across a range of media including film, sound, image, text, installation, and performance. In February 2022, part two of their Artists Web Project, May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth (2020– ), which collates and layers their archived collection of online recordings of performances from Palestine, Iraq, and Syria, will launch.

2022 Exhibition Schedule at Dia Beacon, Dia Bridgehampton, and Dia Chelsea

Larry Bell
Opening March 12, Long-Term View
Dia Beacon
A leading figure of Southern California’s Light and Space movement, Larry Bell explores the intersections of light, color, and volume through glass. In the early 1960s he began experimenting with the perceptual experience that unfolds for the spectator as one encounters a sculpture in its environment by vacuum-coating panels of glass with metallic particles to create reflective and translucent surfaces and forms. This exhibition at Dia Beacon brings together a focused selection of Bell’s early sculptures from key small cubes to one of his first freestanding sculptures, Standings Walls (1968), now in Dia’s collection. These will be presented alongside Duo Nesting Boxes (2021), a new diptych conceived for Dia Beacon that references both the open-form autonomy of Bell’s standing walls and the geometry of his signature cubes. In keeping with Bell’s most recent interests in the apparent saturation and density of color, Duo Nesting Boxes consists of layered panels of green and blue glass.  

Camille Norment
March 3, 2022 – January 29, 2023
Dia Chelsea
Throughout her career, Camille Norment has probed what she terms “cultural psychoacoustics,” defined as the investigation of sociocultural phenomena through sound and music—specifically instances of sonic and social dissonance. In particular, she explores three tones: the bell, feedback, and the sine wave. Expanding on these sonic phenomena for her site-specific commission at Dia Chelsea, Norment will create distinct sculptural installations for the two galleries, which she will unite through a sonic composition. Her installation at 545 West 22nd Street engages withthe history of the site as part of the former shoreline turned landfill. The work touches on the impact of maritime industry on the area as well as the role of society as a human construct in relation to the migration of bodies across the globe. In the adjacent building of 541 West 22nd Street, Norment will engage the three tones in a responsive installation that will interact with bodies moving through the space. This work explores ideas of experienced time and historicity, spirituality, power, and political resistance.

Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth Part II
Launching online February 2022
Artist Web Projects
Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme’s May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth (2020– ) examines how individuals bear witness to experiences of violence, loss, displacement, and forced migration through performance. Since the early 2010s, Abbas and Abou-Rahme have collected online recordings of everyday people singing and dancing in communal spaces in Iraq, Palestine, and Syria. This work brings these recordings together with new performances conceived by the artists, a dancer, and a group of musicians in the cultural underground of Ramallah, Palestine. This evolving project, co-commissioned by Dia Art Foundation and The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, will be presented as both an online project and physical exhibition. The first phase, subtitled Postscript: After everything is extracted, launched on December 10, 2020, as part of Dia’s Artist Web Projects, is accessible for free on Dia’s website. This digital platform expands in February 2022 to include the artists’ extensive collection of recordings. An exhibition at MoMA’s Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Studio will open on March 12, 2022.

Jo Baer
Opening April 8, Long-Term View
Dia Beacon
This exhibition marks the first presentation of Jo Baer’s work at Dia since the vital 2002 survey Jo Baer: The Minimalist Years, 1960–1975 at Dia Center for the Arts in Chelsea. Following several recent acquisitions, this display of her early paintings traces the artist’s progressive experiments with color, form, and visual framing in the 1960s and ’70s. Interrogating both the medium of painting and the canvas itself, Baer’s work from this period complicates notions of the pictorial field and the painted object. The forthcoming exhibition at Dia Beacon will include work from Baer’s Korean, Single Paintings, Double Bar, and Radiator series, and will showcase Baer’s inquiries into the relationships between boundaries and contours as well as centers and peripheries—concerns paramount to her practice.  

Melvin Edwards
Opening May 6, Long-Term View
Dia Beacon
This exhibition presents a group of previously unrealized installations from one of sculptor Melvin Edward’s most dynamic bodies of work. In a brief but prolific period between 1969 and 1970, Edwards developed a series of environmentally scaled sculptures using steel from barbed wire. Each work consists of a simple geometric construction that volumetrically subdivides a space. The punctuated lines of this material are pulled across a section of a room, using linearity to create depth and dimension, and heightening what the artist describes as the “painfully dynamic and aggressive resistance” of the material. In dialogue with the contemporaneously emerging field of Postminimal art, Edwards’s barbed wire sculptures explore geometry in suspension. Meanwhile, the material’s evocative referentiality—to a social, agricultural, and militaristic history of containment and bondage—ensures these works resist resolution. While a small number of these artworks have historically been installed, the rest have remained as diagrammatic plans. Three of these installations, which recently entered Dia’s permanent collection, will be on view here for the first time. Together, they will interrupt the architectural frame of Dia Beacon, provocatively delineating passageways and obstructing corners.

Leslie Hewitt
June 24, 2022 – June 5, 2023
Dia Bridgehampton
Leslie Hewitt’s approach to photography and sculpture reimagines the art-historical still-life genre from a Postminimal perspective. Her geometric compositions, which she frames and crystallizes through the disciplines of photography and film theory, are spare assemblages of ordinary materials and personal effects, suggesting the porosity between intimate and sociopolitical histories. In summer 2022, Hewitt presents a newly commissioned body of work at Dia Bridgehampton. Exploring ideas of light, sound, and inertia, Hewitt realizes an array of low-profile sculptures that will be laterally distributed within and outside the gallery space, as well as diagrammatic scores composed in collaboration with artist Jamal Cyrus.  Hewitt’s expansive sensorium puts forth an alternative corporeal, spatial, and sonic mapping of the site. Interpretations of scores by different musicians will be presented at Dia Bridgehampton and Dia Chelsea through the yearlong run of the exhibition.

Blinky Palermo
Opening June 2022, Long-Term View
Dia Beacon
Returning to view at Dia Beacon, Times of the Day (1974–76) is a pivotal series in Blinky Palermo’s oeuvre, yet one that is rarely seen in its entirety. Conceived by the artist after his relocation to New York from Düsseldorf in 1973, Times of the Day comprises six four-part works and originates Palermo’s serialized, multipart Metal Pictures (or Metallbilder, in German), the last body of work in his short yet pronounced career.

Robert Irwin
Opening Summer 2022, Long-Term View
Dia Beacon
A progenitor of the late 1960s California-based movement known as Light and Space, Robert Irwin began his career as an abstract painter. His early practice shifted from painting in the early 1970s, eschewing objects entirely in favor of more ephemeral, site-conditioned installations. First realized as a commission in 1972 for Harvard University’s Fogg Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Full Room Skylight-Scrim V is an early scrim installation and marks the momentous shift in his practice following his discovery of the ethereal material in 1970. This large-scale work, which recently entered Dia’s permanent collection, goes on long-term view in summer 2022. Given Irwin's central role in the design of Dia Beacon, this display celebrates his foundational vision for the museum and offers the rare opportunity to appreciate the interconnections between the artistic and architectural aspects of his oeuvre. 

Lawrence Weiner
Opening August 2022, Long-Term View
Dia Beacon
Language lies at the core of Lawrence Weiner’s practice, providing a medium for representing material relationships in the external world as objectively as possible. Providing the opportunity for countless manifestations, each installation of Weiner’s works can be conceived in relation to the venue and context. At Dia Beacon, visitors encounter Weiner’s text works in different environments—in a stairwell, in the cafe, over the admissions desk, or on the back of the building. This installation brings a key work, 5 Figures of Structure (1987), back to the galleries.

Jack Whitten
November 2022 – July 2023
Dia Beacon
Jack Whitten’s work from the 1970s marks a juncture in his career in which he rejected the gestural brush strokes of Abstract Expressionism and embarked on what would become a sustained interest in experimental processes and materials. Opening at Dia Beacon this fall is the first-ever exhibition devoted to Whitten’s Greek Alphabet (1975–78) painting series. Whitten used the Greek alphabet as the organizational principle of this landmark-yet-overlooked series, which consists of variations on abstract, black-and-white compositions and experiments in mark-making. For these works, he employed handmade tools and techniques including the comb, imprint, and frottage. Bringing together forty paintings from private and institutional lenders, this exhibition offers unique insight into a pivotal moment in his practice.

Dia Art Foundation 
Taking its name from the Greek word meaning “through,” Dia was established in 1974 with the mission to serve as a conduit for artists to realize ambitious new projects, unmediated by overt interpretation and uncurbed by the limitations of more traditional museums and galleries. Dia’s programming fosters contemplative and sustained consideration of a single artist’s body of work and its collection is distinguished by the deep and longstanding relationships that the nonprofit has cultivated with artists whose work came to prominence particularly in the 1960s and ’70s. 

In addition to Dia Beacon, Dia Bridgehampton, and Dia Chelsea, Dia maintains and operates a constellation of commissions, long-term installations, and site-specific projects, notably focused on Land art, nationally and internationally. These include: 

  • Walter De Maria’s The New York Earth Room (1977) and The Broken Kilometer (1979), Max Neuhaus’s Times Square (1977), and Joseph Beuys’s 7000 Eichen (7000 Oaks, inaugurated in 1982 and ongoing), all of which are located in New York City
  • De Maria’s The Lightning Field (1977) in western New Mexico
  • Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970) in the Great Salt Lake, Utah
  • Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels (1973–76) in the Great Basin Desert, Utah
  • De Maria’s The Vertical Earth Kilometer (1977) in Kassel, Germany

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For additional information or materials, contact:
Hannah Gompertz, Dia Art Foundation, hgompertz@diaart.org, +1 212 293 5598
Melissa Parsoff, Parsoff Communications, mparsoff@parsoff-communications.com, +1 516 445 5899 (US press inquiries)  
Sam Talbot, sam@sam-talbot.com, +44 (0) 772 5184 630 (international press inquiries)

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