Event details
Saturday, January 27, 2024
2–4 pm

Dia Chelsea
537 West 22nd Street
New York, New York

Free. Spaces are limited; register here.  

Drawing on her own relationship to soil as an architect and artist, Diana Mangaser identifies soil as a creative and generative material that shapes our surroundings. For Soil Compositions, Mangaser will lead a material-focused workshop in which participants create their own unique soil compositions by selecting from an array of aggregates.

As a primer for developing a deeper understanding of soil, the workshop imagines each material contributing its specific character to a personal soil structure that reflects the maker’s identity in some way. Once the soil compositions are created, participants will set them into a solid form that can both stand alone and contribute to the building of a collective structure.

In this process of making, Mangaser poses questions for us to consider: What is soil? What is our relationship to soil and in what ways does it reflect on how we build our contemporary life? 

Participants will be asked to use organic materials during the program. If you have questions or concerns about allergies, please contact info@diaart.org.

Diana Mangaser is an artist-architect interested in design as a prismatic lens integrating spatial awareness, architectural sensibility, and aesthetics into the structure of everyday environments. Often collaborating with other artists, her work investigates and activates interstitial and marginalized spaces as loci for transformative creative practices. Mangaser received her BA in Architecture from the University of California, Berkeley, and MArch from Rhode Island School of Design, Providence. Her studio practice is based in Newburgh, New York, where she co-leads the design office Y S D M with Yoshihiro Sergel. Mangaser directs Artist-In-Vacancy, a creative initiative with Newburgh Community Land Bank, which situates artists and their work within vacant properties. Most recently, Y S D M exhibited their work at Manitoga / The Russel Wright Design Center in Philipstown, New York, as Artists-In-Residence. Mangaser has led workshops and designed work for presentation at Dia Beacon, the Swiss Institute, and Whitney Museum of American Art, all in New York, as well as at Bauhaus Dessau in Germany.

About the program series 
In conjunction with Delcy Morelos: El abrazo, Dia presents Soil Sessions, an iterative series of interdisciplinary activations, poetic responses to, discursive reflections on, and embodied engagements with earth as subject and material in Morelos’s work. These public programs, presented monthly throughout the run of the exhibition, invite sustained engagement with the commission through a variety of lenses.

More information on the full program series is available here.