June 7, Bridgehampton, NY – Dia presents a new body of work by Leslie Hewitt conceived for Dia Bridgehampton. The exhibition opens on June 24, 2022, and will be on view through June 5, 2023. Exploring ideas of light, sound, and inertia, Hewitt has realized an array of low-profile sculptures that are laterally distributed within and outside the gallery, as well as a diagrammatic score composed in collaboration with artist Jamal Cyrus. Hewitt and Cyrus invited artists Rashida Bumbray, Jason Moran, and Immanuel Wilkins to interpret the score at venues in New York City and on the East End of Long Island throughout the yearlong run of the show. The exhibition’s expansive sensorium puts forth an alternative corporeal, spatial, and sonic mapping of the site.    

“These new works by Hewitt extend Dia Bridgehampton’s long-standing engagement with the histories of its immediate site and surrounding geographies,” said Jessica Morgan, Dia’s Nathalie de Gunzburg Director. “With remarkable restraint, Hewitt simultaneously evokes the vastness of the landscape as well as the ways in which histories are made through the ebb and flow of day-to-day life over time.”    

Following scholar Tiffany Lethabo King’s theorization of shoals as a locus of resistance to settlers’ conquest and worldview, Hewitt directs us to where land and sea have met and re-formed each other across epochs and generations.    

Inside the gallery at Dia Bridgehampton, three bronze sculptures reference bodies of water on the East End, namely, the Mecox, Peconic, and Shinnecock bays, in relation to the depths of the Atlantic Ocean. A fourth sculpture is installed on the grounds of Dia Bridgehampton. It consists of a locally sourced boulder—formed similarly to the bays, by the interplay of sand and water over epochs—upon which lies a matte bronze silhouette pointing towards the sky. As a counterpoint to the sculptures is a monitor displaying the score conceptualized by Hewitt and Cyrus in a newly developed still-life form. A wooden tambourine sculpture is juxtaposed to an iridescent shell, while metadata scrolls next to them, and sound emanates. The artists thus see the indeterminate logic of Fluxus notations as a way to explore intersections of experimental music, notions of the Black radical tradition and the elemental sounds, patterns, and breaks of the ocean as it meets the shore.  

“In renovating Dia Bridgehampton for the purpose of hosting art, Dan Flavin memorialized its previous functions as a firehouse and then a Baptist church,” said Matilde Guidelli-Guidi, exhibition curator. “The material memory of the building is an invitation to history that Hewitt takes on in this new body of work, acknowledging the land on which it rests and tuning our senses to silenced pasts and the magnitude of geological formations.”

Dia’s permanent installation nine sculptures in fluorescent light created by Dan Flavin between 1963 and 1981 will also be on view on the second floor of Dia Bridgehampton.   

Leslie Hewitt is curated by Matilde Guidelli-Guidi.

Leslie Hewitt at Dia Bridgehampton is made possible by generous support from Perrotin and Clarice Oliveira Tavares. Additional support is provided by the Girlfriend Fund, Jane Hait and Justin Beal, Ronald and Jo Carole Lauder Foundation, Neda Young, and those who wish to remain anonymous.

Performances 

Jason Moran, Sunday, November 27, 2022, 3 pm 
Village Vanguard, 178 7th Avenue, New York 

Immanuel Wilkins, Sunday, March 5, 2023, 3 pm
Dia Chelsea, 537 W 22nd Street, New York   

Rashida Bumbray, Sunday, May 14, 2023 
Location and time to be announced 

Lecture 

Tiffany Lethabo King, date and time to be announced
Dia Chelsea, 537 W 22nd Street, New York  

About Leslie Hewitt 

Leslie Hewitt is an artist living in Harlem, New York and Houston, Texas. Hewitt has held residencies at the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Project Row Houses, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, Konstepidemin in Göteborg, Sweden and the American Academy in Berlin, Germany amongst others. Solo presentations of her work have been held at Artists Space, New York (2007);LA><ART,Los Angeles (2006) the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2010); Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Missouri (2012); Menil Collection, Houston (2013); Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2014); Sculpture Center, Long Island City, New York (2016); The Power Plant, Toronto, Canada (2016)  and Douglas Hyde Gallery, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland (2022).  

About Dia Bridgehampton 
Established by Dia Art Foundation in 1983, Dia Bridgehampton was designed by Dan Flavin to permanently house an installation of his work alongside a program of temporary exhibitions. With Dia’s support, Flavin renovated this turn-of-the-century Shingle-style firehouse, then church, converting its vestibule and second floor into a permanent display of his signature works in fluorescent light. A resident of nearby Wainscott, Flavin envisioned that the first floor would be both a venue for changing exhibitions and a print shop. Today, Dia continues to maintain Flavin’s permanent installation of nine works in fluorescent light, the Dan Flavin Art Institute, and to present yearly exhibitions by artists primarily residing or working on Long Island in the first-floor gallery. 

Dia Bridgehampton is located at 23 Corwith Avenue in Bridgehampton, New York. Dia Bridgehampton is always free.  

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, 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)