To trace, to touch. . . . Returning again and again to the books and to places, to find something previously missed. Something that has a different meaning after different encounters, different inhabitations, and different journeys over the passage of time.

–Renée Green

Since the late 1980s, Renée Green has produced densely layered, knowledge-based work that combines images, objects, texts, and time-based media, adapting strategies of Minimal and Conceptual art from the 1960s and ’70s. In her uniquely recursive process, the artist circuits a range of references—archival, documentary, and literary fragments; found and personal ephemera; speculative narratives; and her own extant works—to probe the unstable boundaries between fact and fiction, public recollection and individual memory. Green’s work accumulates new meaning as it travels through varying institutional contexts, embracing a diasporic politics of site-specificity and implicating viewers within global networks of cultural circulation and knowledge production.

For her first major solo museum presentation in New York, the artist draws on her core strategies and typologies to position a selection of rarely seen paintings and multimedia installations, with an emphasis on the late 1980s and ’90s, in dialogue with newly commissioned Bichos and Space Poems, and other works reconfigured specifically for Dia Beacon. Constellating historical, reimagined, and new work in the two expansive central galleries and adjacent perpendicular corridor, this chronologically defiant exhibition aptly stages the artist’s practice in contact and context with influential figures key to Dia’s history and Green’s formation.

The entirety of the artist’s Color series (1990) is presented together for the first time since its inception. In this early group of mixed-media, diagrammatic paintings, Green contends with the perceptions and politics of color, examining how it functions as a tool for categorization; a socially coded, arbitrary value system; and an efficacious perceptual and spatial device for her poetic imaginings. These works slyly employ formal elements used by her Minimal and Conceptual predecessors—the monochrome and the grid, in addition to language, indexical systems, and serial order—to reveal how compositional, chromatic, and discursive structures condition our behavior and understanding. Indeed, Color I–IV place text-color combinations atop supposedly neutral gray supports to animate, question, and destabilize biases that inform our associations between language, color, and identity. Color I, for example, intermingles racially charged excerpts from Frances E. W. Harper’s novel Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted (1892) and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) with a grid of paint swatches annotated with exotifying commercial names such as Jamaican Dream, Havana Sunrise, Mexican Orange, and Brazil Brown. Juxtaposing literary excerpts with color charts, Green underscores how color traffics in cultural and discursive significations that go beyond the strictly visual.

The artist’s preoccupation with the artifice of neutrality extends beyond the Color series. The multimedia installation Neutral/Natural (1990) divides two cascading sets of visual and textual information under these categories. Under the neutral label are five gray-painted wooden blocks with numerical ratios that appear to correspond to levels of black and white in the mixture, but on closer inspection reveal themselves as possibly fictional figures. Affixed to a wooden plank under the natural heading is a photograph of philosopher, feminist, activist, writer, and icon Angela Davis with an arrow pointing to her Afro, as well as a mason jar filled with tree bark, a framed image of a waterfall, and a wooden tablet listing branches of knowledge including law, number, philosophy, and religion, at once reinforcing the “natural” designation and undermining it. African-animal sounds emit from a wooden box labelled data, parodying field recordings and further sounding the epistemological and ethical limits of such systems of classification. Similarly, in Which? (1990), a two-tone compositional structure bifurcates a wooden plank into opposing sides of black and white with antonymic pairings such as darkness and lightness, imagination and reason, image and concept, nature and culture, and other and same. Bridging the divide in the middle of the panel are three half-filled fishbowls through which the mirrored reflections of words become legible, albeit spelled backward—shifting, indeterminate, and ambiguous—expressing uncertainty and diluting these binaries.

Extending this chromatic engagement to the ceiling, Green has suspended a series of new and revisited Space Poems—vibrant, double-sided, text-based banners—in four clusters throughout the central galleries. Space Poem #14(Long Poem in Four Parts) (2025) combines Green’s own writing with citations ranging from poet May Swenson and writer Jorge Luis Borges to artist Sol LeWitt, among other literary, philosophical, geological, and historical sources that form a web of coincidences and correspondences. Enunciating like fragmented choruses on four different islands, the banners collectively articulate an archipelago of indeterminate relays and relations, each reading varying with a perceiver’s position, pacing, and trajectory in the galleries as well as the desires, memories, and imaginings they project onto each floating excerpt. In their capacious abundance and ambivalence, Green’s Space Poems embody, as one of them reads, “A / Certain / Impossibility / At / Capturing / Boundlessness.”

These banners are complemented by a new body of wall-mounted variations in enamel, which seem to hover slightly off the wall, compressing color, time, and landscape. For Space Poem #6 (Tracing Excerpt) (2025), Green has imbued new material life into an excerpt from her eponymous 2016 Space Poem, cross-pollinating the names of vanished gardens and the years and locations of historical maps in verdant chroma hues. Its twenty-four panels are distributed in sequential bands, punctuating the perimeters of the galleries.

New hybrid configurations of Green’s Bichos—human-scale, multicolored, modular structures for viewing and listening—feature selections from her compendium of moving-image and sound works. Titled Bicho Units, Sonic Bichos, and Spatial Bichos (all 2025), they reference Brazilian Neo-Concrete artist Lygia Clark’s Bichos (“beasts” in Portuguese, a series of small-scale, hinged, interactive metal sculptures from the early 1960s), advancing a genealogy of radical modes of participation beyond visual perception. Functioning as sculptures, partitions, and media booths, Green’s Bichos recontextualize the focused selection of her time-based media, in each iteration altering how the latter, as well as the surrounding environs, are experienced. In parallel, Green’s moving-image and sound works are at once a mode of contact and inquiry; an essayistic account or index; an interface with elsewhere; and a contextual and spatial device. Selected by the artist to resonate with Dia’s history, the films address questions of site-specificity, land displacement, and utopian dreams, while simultaneously employing serial and structural formal devices to convey their essayistic mode. Migrating between sites and formats, in the same manner that their content flows between geographies and temporalities, these films inform a larger consideration of the medium and the ways in which our experience of moving images is shaped by their setting, from the darkened cinema to the naturally lit gallery.

The foundational multimedia installations Pigskin Library and Peak (both 1991) are exhibited here for the first time in the United States since their debut in Green’s 1991 exhibition VistaVision: Landscape of Desire at the legendary Pat Hearn Gallery in New York. With these early scenographic installations, Green stages complex and charged questions and relations. As posed in the exhibition’s press release: “How is Africa (or how are Africas) constructed in our minds? What sort of projections and desires do we bring to the landscape?”¹At Dia, these questions are amplified and inflected by the entanglement of art-historical genres of site, landscape, and Land art, as well as the colonial specters that accompany them.

Pigskin Library is a critical restaging of Theodore Roosevelt’s traveling library, which accompanied him during his momentous expedition to Africa in 1909–10 to collect flora and fauna specimens for inaugural displays at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., and expand the collection of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. In this environmental installation, Green adapts museological display strategies recalling a natural-history museum diorama or period room, transforming Roosevelt’s library of colonial leisure into an archival mise-en-scène in which one can peruse his trove of Western literary classics and decipher two color-coded taxonomies associated with his conquests, while John Philip Sousa’s “The Corcoran Cadets” (1890) plays ambiently on loop, setting a flag-waving, imperialistic mood. Whereas the logic of one taxonomic key is seemingly rational, linking colors to Latin animal-species names, the other refers to systems of chance like divination or gambling, throwing into sharp relief the colonial nature of Roosevelt’s exercise of imposing scientific order to code, capture, and compress Africa for Western audiences.

In a similar vein, Peak interrogates the complicated genealogy of traveling artists, including Green herself. This vertical construction arranges expeditionary materials to consider how site is variously represented and abstracted, evoking Conceptual and Land artist Robert Smithson’s notion of site/non-site as an image captured by landscape photographer Ansel Adams functions as a portal or virtual interface onto the depicted mountain summit. The binoculars and telescope—perceptual apparatuses of enhanced and extended sight—emphasize how site is politically entangled with landscape survey and the trappings of colonialism. The work also stages an unfolding drama with shoe prints ascending to the proverbial peak as though the explorers, whose grandiose accounts are ranked on the opposite side of the structure, had just entered the photograph, collapsing the terrain of the gallery with landscapes of desire and conquest.

The destination at the end of the central galleries is a vast assortment of coordinates indicating speculative and fantastical geographies. Along the corridor stretching from east to west, Green’s Elsewhere? [Wall version] (2002/25) charts the names of imaginary places throughout literature, covering the walls previously occupied by Conceptual artist Lawrence Weiner’s language-based work, a fitting hauntology. Imaginary Places (A to Z) (2002) reverberates throughout the hall, a disembodied voice whispering the names of the fictitious locations amidst exquisite musical tones.

With a combinatory distribution of works across media encouraging durational, multidirectional, and cross-disciplinary encounters, visitors walk, sit, listen, look up, and read, engaging with varying levels of attention and modes of perception. Presenting a meandering parcours—both ambulatory and imaginary—through the three galleries that form the circulatory arteries of the building, the exhibition emphasizes nonlinear and accretive experience, mirroring Green’s methodologies of relays and returns as well as the entropic forces of culture and nature. As with each encounter, the equator has moved.

—Jordan Carter

Notes

Epigraph: Renée Green, “Come Closer,” film script (2008), published in Other Planes of There: Selected Writings (Duke University Press, 2014), p. 423.

1. Green, artist statement, in Pat Hearn Gallery, “VistaVision: Landscape of Desire,” press release, 1991.

Further reading

Carter, Jordan, and Svetlana Kitto, eds. Renée Green: The Equator Has Moved. Dia Art Foundation, forthcoming.

Green, Renée. Camino Road. Primary Information, 2021.

Green, Renée. Other Planes of There: Selected Writings. Duke University Press, 2014.

Leaver-Yap, Mason, ed. Renée Green: Inevitable Distances. Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2022.

Meyer, James. What Happened to the Institutional Critique? American Fine Arts and Paula Cooper Gallery, 1993.

Oleksijczuk, Denise. Lost Illusions: Recent Landscape Art. Vancouver Art Gallery, 1991.

Renée Green: Endless Dreams and Time-Based Streams. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 2010.

Renée Green: Ongoing Becomings; Retrospective 1989–2009. JRP|Ringier and Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne, 2009.

Renée Green: Pacing. Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University, and Free Agent Media, 2020.

Renée Green: Sombras y señales/Shadows and Signals. Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 2000.

Renée Green: World Tour. Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 1993.

1. Space Poem #14 (Long Poem in Four Parts), 2025
Dye-sublimation print on Poly Duck banners, 93 parts overall
Commissioned by Dia Art Foundation

    a. Space Poem #11.1 (The Equator Has Moved), 2025
    12 parts

    b. Space Poem #13 (Us Together), 2025
    30 parts

    c. Space Poem #7 (Color Without Objects: Intra-Active May-Words), 2020
    28 parts

    d. Space Poem #9 (Today), 2023
    23 parts

2. Peak, 1991 
Wood, latex paint, gelatin silver print, Naugahyde flag with vinyl lettering, dirt, gel medium, rubber-stamped ink on vellum, plexiglass, ribbon, framed gelatin silver print, magnifying glass with arm clamp, telescope, binoculars, tripod, climbing rope, strap, carabiners, and ladder

3. Colour Games, 1989 
Acrylic on wood, Letraset dry-transfer lettering, and rubber-stamped ink on Masonite 
Collection Yun Chun Lu

4. Sonic Bichos, 2025 
Fabric, aluminum, wood, and speakers, 4 units
Commissioned by Dia Art Foundation

    a. Some Chance Operations (Shadows and Signals Version), 2000
    Sound

        i. Serial Order (English Version) 
        1:30 min.

        ii. Serial Order (Spanish Version)
        1:30 min. 

        iii. ABCDEFGHI (English Version) 
        2:05 min. 

        iv. ABCDEFGHI (Spanish Version)
        1:58 min. 

        v. Voice Over (English Version)
        4:26 min.

        vi. Voice Over (Spanish Version) 
        4:14 min. 

        vii. Between and Including A and Z – Abridged Version
        21 min.

    b. Vanished Gardens, 2004 
    Sound, 6:08 min 

    c. Muriel’s Words, 2005
    Sound, 50 min.

5. Color IV, 1990 
Latex paint and acrylic on wood, rubber-stamped ink on vellum, rubber-stamped ink on acrylic on wood, plexiglass, vinyl lettering, and engraved plexiglass signs
Collection Landesbank Baden-Württemberg, Stuttgart

6. Space Poem #6 (Tracing Excerpt), 2025
Porcelain enamel on steel, 24 parts
Commissioned by Dia Art Foundation

7. The Digital Import/Export Funk Office [CD-ROM Brochure], 2011 
Digital-pigment print on paper

8. IEFO Sigetics [Navigational Icon], 2010/25
Latex paint on wall

9. Bicho Units, 2025 
Fabric, aluminum, wood, monitors, and speakers, 5 units
Commissioned by Dia Art Foundation

    a. Partially Buried, 1996
    Digital film, color, with sound, 20 min. 

    b. Partially Buried Continued, 1997 
    Digital film, color, with sound, 36 min. 

    c. Excess, 2009 
    Digital film, color, silent, 13 min.

    d. Elsewhere?, 2002 
    Digital film, color, with sound, 55 min.

    e. Endless Dreams and Water Between, 2009
    Digital film, color, with sound, 74 min. 

    f. Some Chance Operations, 1999
    Digital film, color, with sound, 38 min.

10. Endless Dreams and Time-Based Streams Color Chart, 2011 
Digital-pigment print on paper

11. Space Poem #2 (Laura’s Words): Silent 2D Version, 2011
Digital-pigment print on paper

12. Color III, 1990 
Latex paint and acrylic on wood, rubber-stamped ink on vellum and foamcore, plexiglass, and vinyl lettering

13. Neutral/Natural, 1990 
Plexiglass signs, wood, acrylic, photostat, rubber-stamped ink on vellum, vinyl lettering, photographs, glass jar, and bark, with sound (field recordings of African animals, 25:58 min.)

14. Spatial Bichos, 2025
Fabric and aluminum, 2 units
Commissioned by Dia Art Foundation

15. Color II, 1990 
Latex paint and acrylic on wood, rubber-stamped ink on vellum and foamcore, plexiglass, glass jars, and pigments
Private collection 

16. Pigskin Library, 1991 
Wood and cloth; table, tablecloths, engraved metal- and-wood plaque, trunk, book titles rubber-stamped on fabric and wood tablets, rubber-stamped ink on placard, and stool; latex paint on wood file boxes, Latin animal-species names rubber-stamped on color-coded wood cards, paper and vinyl lettering on placards, and archival cotton gloves, with sound (John Philip Sousa,“The Corcoran Cadets,” 1890, 3:12 min.)

17. Color/No Color, 1990 
Latex enamel, Letraset dry-transfer lettering, and rubber-stamped ink on wood
Collection Dr. Paul Marks, Toronto

18. Gilles Deleuze, 2011
Digital-pigment print and letterpress on paper

19. Gertrude Stein, 2011 
Digital-pigment print and letterpress on paper

20. William Morris, 2011 
Digital-pigment print and letterpress on paper

21. Which?, 1990
Latex paint on wood, photostat on acetate and foamcore, plexiglass, vinyl tape, vinyl lettering, glass fishbowls, and water

22. Color I, 1990 
Latex paint and acrylic on wood, rubber-stamped ink on vellum and foamcore, plexiglass, and paint chips

23. Elsewhere? [Wall version], 2002/25
Vinyl lettering and latex paint on wall

24. Imaginary Places (A to Z), 2002
Sound, 50 min. 

All works courtesy the artist, Free Agent Media, and Bortolami Gallery, New York, unless otherwise noted 

Renée Green was born in Cleveland in 1959. In her multidisciplinary practice, she draws on Minimal and Conceptual traditions as well as myriad literary, philosophical, and historical sources to examine perception and memory with consideration of site and time. She graduated from Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, in 1981, and participated in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program in New York in 1989–90. Surveys of her work have been held at Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne, Switzerland (2009–10); Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco (2010); and KW Institute for Contemporary Art with daadgalerie, Berlin (2021–22). Extensive solo presentations include those at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1993); Secession, Vienna (1999); and Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Cambridge, Massachusetts (2016–18). In 2008, a retrospective of her films took place at Jeu de Paume, Paris. Her work has been included in numerous biennials, including those at the Whitney Museum of American Art (1993 and 2022), Venice (1993), Gwangju (1997), and Berlin (2001), as well as in Documenta 11, Kassel (2002). A prolific writer, Green has written essays and fiction for magazines and journals such as Collapse, October, Texte zur Kunst, and Transition. She is the author of Other Planes of There: Selected Writings (2014) and the editor of Negotiations in the Contact Zone (2003). Green is a professor at the Art, Culture, and Technology program, School of Architecture and Planning, at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. She lives in Somerville, Massachusetts, and New York.

Renée Green: The Equator Has Moved | February 21, 2025