For Immediate Release
July 23, 2020

New York, NY, July 23, 2020 – Dia Art Foundation is pleased to announce the reopening of Dia Beacon and Dia Bridgehampton and an updated exhibition schedule at these locations for 2020, following four months of COVID-19–related closures. Both sites will reopen with new protocols to ensure the safety of staff and visitors. Dia Bridgehampton will reopen on July 25, 2020, followed by Dia Beacon on August 7, 2020. The reopening dates for Walter De Maria’s The New York Earth Room (1977) and The Broken Kilometer (1979) will be announced later this summer. 

“Art provides inspiration, education, and joy during difficult times, and our communities need that now in a different and more urgent way than ever before,” said Jessica Morgan, Dia’s Nathalie de Gunzburg director. “Our team has been working diligently behind-the-scenes to plan for our various reopenings and to ensure everyone’s safety. I am thrilled to welcome our community back to Dia Beacon and Dia Bridgehampton and provide them with the opportunity to engage with art again.”

Both Dia Beacon and Dia Bridgehampton will offer reduced opening hours. Enhanced cleaning protocols and visitor procedures are in place to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Face coverings are required for staff and visitors and capacity inside the buildings is limited. Visitors are asked to refrain from entering if, over the last fourteen days, they have had symptoms or tested positive for COVID-19, have been in close contact with someone diagnosed with COVID-19, or have visited a high infection area. 

Admission to Dia Beacon is by advance reservation. Timed tickets for the month of August are available to the public beginning August 3, 2020, 10 am, at diaart.org.

To find out more about Dia’s new opening hours, ticketing, and health and safety protocols, please visit this page. Please email info@diaart.org or call 845 440 0100 for more information. 

Updated 2020 Exhibition Schedule at Dia Beacon and Dia Bridgehampton

In addition to the updates listed below, exhibitions of work by Joan Jonas and Keith Sonnier at Dia Beacon will now take place in fall 2021 and spring 2022 respectively.

Carl Craig
Now Extended Through Summer 2021
Dia Beacon
Acclaimed Detroit-based techno DJ and producer Carl Craig has been commissioned by Dia to create a sound installation in dialogue with the unique architecture of one of the largest galleries at Dia Beacon. Party/After-Party (2020) marks his first commission for an art institution and culminates a five-year-long engagement with Dia. This sound installation reimagines Dia Beacon’s lower level, creating a sonic environment that is anchored to the site’s manufacturing history as a former Nabisco packaging factory and recalling the techno tradition of reclaiming industrial spaces for radical experimentation. The work accesses both the euphoria of the club environment and the loneliness that follows this collective experience. This new commission continues Dia’s long-term support for experimentation across media, as well as its commitment to fostering music and sound-based programming at the institution’s various sites. In conjunction with the commission, Dia is hosting the Carl Craig Sessions, a cumulative platform of public programs exploring the legacy of techno through summer 2021. 

Jill Magid
July 25, 2020–June 6, 2021
Dia Bridgehampton
Dia presents a yearlong installation of new work by the Conceptual artist, writer, and filmmaker Jill Magid. Magid’s practice interrogates structures of power on an intimate level, exploring the emotional, philosophical, and legal tensions that exist between institutions and individual agency. For her exhibition at Dia Bridgehampton, Magid presents the series Homage CMYK (2019), consisting of eleven four-channel screenprints on linen hung to fit the gallery in an immersive installation. In dialogue with Dan Flavin’s permanent display of fluorescent light works on the second floor of the building, the layered, luminous surfaces of Homage CMYK call into question authorship, influence, and how an object changes in relation to its context over time.

This series takes as its departure point two unlicensed screenprints on linen derived from Josef Albers’s iconic series Homage to the Square (1950–75) that hang in Mexican architect Luis Barragán’s library and living room at his preserved Mexico City home. To make Homage CMYK, Magid scanned photographic reproductions of these copies, cropped the skewed works, and manipulated them back into their intended square format, finally printing them again in their original size and support—now layered with multiple reproduction processes, including commercial printing, photography, book publication, and Photoshop. 

Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme
Launching Online November 2020
Artist Web Projects

Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme present a new online work as part of Dia’s series of Artist Web Projects, the longest-running web art commissioning series in the United States, all of which are accessible for free online. May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth (2020) is a multipart project that will unfold over the course of one year. It will launch on Dia’s website with a digital postscript, which is centered on the idea of being in a constant state of mourning, as experienced between physical and virtual spaces. The project will evolve to focus on the artists’ archived collection of online recordings, which feature performances by anonymous dancers, musicians, and singers in Iraq, Palestine, and Syria, as well as a series of recordings of performances by electronic musicians and dancers from Palestine. Challenging censorship in the virtual space, May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth assembles a body of knowledge in defiance of its continuous digital erasure. 

Mario Merz
Opening November 2020, Long-Term View
Dia Beacon
Featuring Dia’s recent acquisitions and historical loans from collections in the United States and the Fondazione Merz in Turin, this long-term exhibition foregrounds key forms and motifs that animate the artist’s radical oeuvre. Mario Merz was a central figure in the Arte Povera movement, which emerged in Italy in the midst of an international wave of sociopolitical uprisings in the late 1960s. Formally related to Postminimalism in the United States and Mono-ha (School of Things) in Japan, Arte Povera adopted an aesthetic that challenged the traditional values placed on art objects by dissolving sculpture into performance. Spanning the mid-1960s through the mid-1980s, the exhibition reveals key forms and motifs present throughout Merz’s conceptually rigorous and visionary practice such as his signature igloos and tables, distinctive use of neon, and deployment of the Fibonacci sequence—where each number equals the sum of the two that precede it—for the structure of his installations.

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 1970s.  

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, which was 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
Sam Talbot, sam@sam-talbot.com, +44 (0) 772 5184 630