Dia Talks
Barry Le Va in Conversation with James Meyer
Saturday, February 8, 2020, 2 pm, Dia Beacon
Event Details
Saturday, February 8, 2020, 2 pm
Dia Beacon
3 Beekman Street
Beacon, New York
Free with museum admission. Space is limited and offered on a first-come, first-served basis.
Barry Le Va was born in Long Beach, California, in 1941. He studied at California State University, Long Beach, from 1960 to 1963, and later received a BA and an MFA from Otis Art Institute, Los Angeles, in 1964 and 1967, respectively. He started teaching art in the late 1960s and has worked as an instructor at Minneapolis College of Art and Design, Princeton University, and Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. Following his first solo exhibition in 1969 at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, his work was included in landmark presentations including Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials in 1969 at the Whitney Museum of American Art and Information in 1970 at the Museum of Modern Art, both in New York City. Le Va has also participated in Documenta (1972, 1977, and 1982) and the Whitney Annual and Biennial exhibitions (1971, 1977, and 1995). Major surveys of his work have taken place at, among others, the New Museum, New York (1979); Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2005); and Serralves Museum, Porto, Portugal (2006). In recent years Le Va’s work has been included in exhibitions at MoMA PS1, New York (2015–16); Yale University School of Art (2015); Dallas Museum of Art (2015); and David Nolan Gallery, New York (2018). He lives and works in New York.
James Meyer is curator of modern art at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and curatorial and academic advisor at Dia Art Foundation in New York City. He was previously the Winship Distinguished Research Associate Professor of Art History at Emory University in Atlanta and deputy director and chief curator at Dia. At the National Gallery of Art, Meyer has organized exhibitions of works by Anne Truitt, Mel Bochner, and Kerry James Marshall; most recently, he organized Spaces: Works from the Collection, 1966–1976 (2018–19), which featured Le Va’s sculpture Equal Quantities: Placed or Dropped In, Out, and On in Relation to Specific Boundaries (1967). His research has been awarded a number of prestigious grants and honors, among them a Sterling Clark Fellowship; a Smithsonian Senior Fellowship; the Daphne Mayo Visiting Professorship at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia; and a Getty Research Support Grant. Meyer’s books include Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties (2001), Minimalism (2000), and edited volumes of the writings of Carl Andre and Gregg Bordowitz. His most recent publications are Dwan Gallery: Los Angeles to New York, 1959–1971 (2016) and The Art of Return: The Sixties and Contemporary Culture (2019).