Dia Art Foundation
Dia Art Foundation is a nonprofit organization that initiates, supports, presents, and preserves art projects. It was established in 1974 as the Lone Star Foundation, by Philippa de Menil, the daughter of Houston arts patron Dominique de Menil and an heiress to the Schlumberger oil exploration fortune; art dealer Heiner Friedrich, Philippa's husband; and Helen Winkler, a Houston art historian. Dia wanted to support projects "whose nature or scale would preclude other funding sources."
Dia holds a major collection of work by artists of the 1960s and 1970s, on view at Dia Beacon that opened in the Hudson Valley in 2003. Dia also presents exhibitions and programs at Dia Chelsea in New York City, located at 535, 541 and 545 West 22nd Street. In addition to its exhibition spaces at Dia Beacon 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. Dia's permanent collection holdings include artworks by artists who came to prominence during the 1960s and 1970s, including Joseph Beuys, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Agnes Martin, and Andy Warhol. The art of this period represented a radical departure in artistic practice and is often large in scale; it is occasionally ephemeral or site-specific.
Currently, Dia commissions, supports, and presents site-specific installations and long-term exhibitions of work by these artists, as well as those of younger generations.
History
Founded in 1974 as the Dia Art Foundation, it first patronized a group of artists that included Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, John Chamberlain, Walter De Maria, La Monte Young, and Marian Zazeela. They received stipends, studios, and archivists in anticipation of one-man museums that Dia planned for several of them. Philippa's husband, Francesco Pellizzi, was on the original six-member board, and Dominique and Christophe de Menil were on the advisory council. Starting in 1979, the foundation hired architect Richard Gluckman and started looking for reinforced-concrete structures suitable for showing art. Gluckman helped locate Dia's present Chelsea building on West 23rd Street for a planned Cy Twombly museum, a performance space for Robert Whitman on West 19th Street, and the Mercantile Exchange on Harrison Street for Young and Zazeela. In 1980, Dia opened the Masjid Al-Fara, a Sufi mosque replete with Flavin light works and living quarters for Muzaffer Ozak, in a former firehouse at 155 Mercer Street.The financial difficulties during the 1980s reduced Dia's annual expenditures from $5 million in 1984 to 1.2 million in 1987, accompanied by Heiner Friedrich's departure and the end of Philippa de Menil's financial support though she continued to hold a position on Dia's board. Philippa de Menil's mother, Dominique de Menil, stepped in, ousted Friedrich and installed Ashton Hawkins, an executive vice president at the Metropolitan Museum, as Dia's chairman. Along with Hawkins, the new board members included Lois de Menil, John C. Evans, future United States Supreme Court justice Stephen Breyer, Margaret Douglas-Hamilton, and Herbert Brownell. The board then hired as director Charles Wright and curator Gary Garrels. The mosque was removed from 155 Mercer Street. La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela had to leave the Harrison Street building, which was then sold for $5.5 million. By the end of 1987, real-estate and art sales had brought in about $17 million to pay the debt and start an endowment. The foundation was renamed the Dia Center for the Arts and a program of poetry readings, performances, lectures and publications was begun.
Locations and sites
Dia Beacon, Riggio Galleries
Dia Beacon, Riggio Galleries in Beacon, New York, is located in a former printing plant built in 1929 by Nabisco. When it opened in 2003 with of exhibition space, it became one of the largest museums to open in the United States since the Museum of Modern Art opened in the late 1930s.Each gallery was designed specifically for the art it contains. The space is limited to the works of 25 artists, including:
- Andy Warhol's 1978–79 multipart work Shadows, which wraps around the walls of a single big room;
- selections from Dan Flavin's series of fluorescent light monuments to V. Tatlin, displayed in a room the size of a football field;
- Richard Serra's monumental steel sculptures Torqued Ellipses; and
- Michael Heizer's North, East, South, West.
Dia collaborated with Robert Irwin and architect OpenOffice to formulate the plan for the museum building and its exterior setting. The grounds include an entrance court, and parking lot with a grove of flowering fruit trees and a formal garden, both of which were designed by Irwin.
According to The New York Times, it cost $50 million to build, with Leonard Riggio contributing at least $35 million of that amount; the remainder of the construction funds came from the Lannan Foundation, Ann Tenenbaum and her husband Thomas H. Lee, among others. As of 2007 its annual operating costs are about $3 million a year.
Dia Bridgehampton
Dia Bridgehampton, previously known as the Dan Flavin Art Institute, is a museum in Bridgehampton, New York opened in 1983 to houses nine fluorescent light works by Dan Flavin on permanent display. Besides the permanent exhibit there is also a gallery for temporary exhibitions and a display on the history of the building.Dia Chelsea
In October 1987, when Dia Chelsea opened its main space, it attracted about 16,000 to 17,000 visitors a year. Before it closed for renovations in February 2004, attendance had grown to about 60,000. The extent of the repairs needed prompted the foundation to sell the building for $38.55 million in December 2007.Dia began as an institution dedicated to supporting long-term projects by living artists, and for several years, it was trying to raise money to build a space for such endeavors in Manhattan, after outgrowing its two locations on West 22nd Street in Chelsea and closing them in 2004. The foundation's board abandoned plans on opening a museum at the entrance to the High Line in 2006 after losing its longtime director, Michael Govan, and its chairman and benefactor, Leonard Riggio.
In November 2009 Dia's Director, Philippe Vergne, announced plans to reopen in Chelsea on West 22nd Street. In 2011, after years of negotiations, Dia bought the former Alcamo Marble building at 541 West 22nd Street, located between its former space at No. 545 and its existing six-story building at No. 535, for $11.5 million. Inside, these three existing brick buildings will be woven together to create three interconnected galleries on the ground floor. According to plans, the new Dia, designed by architect Roger Duffy, will include 15,670 square feet of gallery space and 3,625 square feet of rooftop for outdoor exhibitions like Dan Graham's Rooftop Urban Park Project, an architectural pavilion fashioned from two-way mirrored glass that was originally installed on the roof of No. 548.
In 2015, incoming Dia Director Jessica Morgan reactivated three properties already owned by Dia in Chelsea at 535, 541 and 545 West 22nd Street, including re-launching the space at 545 West 22nd Street with an exhibition of La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela. From September 2016, Hauser & Wirth took over the old four-story space at 548 West 22nd Street as a temporary home while constructing its new building at no. 542. To adapt the space, the gallery enlisted Annabelle Selldorf.
In 2018, Dia announced a multi-year plan to revitalize it's programmatic sites, including the renovation of Dia's current spaces at West 22nd Street to create a unified, 32,500-square-foot facility, including 20,000 square feet of integrated, street-level exhibition and programming space across their three contiguous buildings. The new, renovated Dia Chelsea will open in Fall 2020 and will present exhibitions, public programs and lectures, and will return Dia’s bookstore to Chelsea.
Permanent collection
Over Dia's first ten years, its founders assembled a collection of a select group of artists. Among those whose work was commissioned and collected at that time are Joseph Beuys, John Chamberlain, Walter De Maria, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Imi Knoebel, Blinky Palermo, Fred Sandback, Cy Twombly, Robert Whitman, and La Monte Young. In 1979 the Lone Star Foundation acquired Shadows, the monumental painting installation by Andy Warhol consisting of 102 canvases, as a single entity from the artist during its inaugural exhibition at the Heiner Friedrich Gallery in New York.In 1991 Dia gave the Menil Collection in Houston six of its best works by Twombly in anticipation of the Twombly Gallery that opened there in 1995. In anticipation of the opening of Dia Beacon, Dia augmented its core collection with focused acquisitions. The first of these was made in 1997, when Board Chairman Leonard Riggio and his family gave the Foundation three sculptures from Richard Serra's Torqued Ellipses series, sculptures created for an exhibition at Dia Chelsea; it was the first acquisition for Dia's permanent collection in over ten years, a $2 million purchase made by Riggio. With support from the Lannan Foundation, the artists themselves, and others, the collection has expanded with gifts, purchases, and long-term loans of works by other artists from that same generation—Bernd and Hilla Becher, Louise Bourgeois, Hanne Darboven, Michael Heizer, Robert Irwin, On Kawara, Sol LeWitt, Agnes Martin, Bruce Nauman, Gerhard Richter, Robert Ryman, Robert Smithson, and Lawrence Weiner—as well as additional works by artists already represented.
In recent years, Dia has focused on broadening its collection to spotlight a more diverse and international mix of artists. Female artists who have been added to the permanent collection include Mary Corse, Nancy Holt, Dorothea Rockburne, Michelle Stuart and Anne Truitt. In 2017, Dia acquired work by Kishio Suga and Lee Ufan, bringing seminal work from the 1960s Mono-ha movement in Japan into the collection to promote greater understanding of work being made internationally during this period. In 2017, Robert Ryman, a key Dia artist, donated 21 of his works to the institution, making Dia's Ryman holdings unparalleled in any other public collection.
Deaccessioning
In 1985, the Dia Art Foundation for the first time auctioned off 18 works at Sotheby's, including pieces by Cy Twombly and Barnett Newman, for $1.3 million. In 2013, the foundation announced its plan to sell another group of paintings and sculptures — including pieces by Twombly, Chamberlain and Barnett Newman — at Sotheby's, this time hoping to raise at least $20 million for an acquisition budget and to pay for 30 works that have been on long-term loan to Dia from the Lannan Foundation. In response, founders Heiner Friedrich and Fariha de Menil filed suit in New York Supreme Court, seeking an injunction against the foundation and Sotheby's while raising the possibility that some of the works might not be legally owned by Dia but constitute long-term loans from the Friedrichs. However, the lawsuit was dropped shortly after, and the consigned works raised $38.4 million.Long-term and affiliated projects
Michael Govan, the former director of Dia under whose direction Dia Beacon was constructed, estimates that before Philippa de Menil's family forced her to sharply cut back on funding—an act precipitated by the 1980s oil glut's effect on the Schlumberger fortune—Dia spent "at least $40 million" on a series of installations that Dia continues to maintain.Among those 1970s and early 1980s projects are works by Walter De Maria, including The Lightning Field, near Quemado, New Mexico; and The New York Earth Room and The Broken Kilometer, in New York City. In addition, Dia maintains the Dan Flavin Art Institute, a former church in Bridgehampton, New York converted in the 1980s into an installation of works by Flavin. The installation of work by Donald Judd and John Chamberlain, in Marfa, Texas, was begun by Judd; Dia gave the project $4 million between 1980 and 1986, before cutting off the financial support due to Dia's financial crisis; a lawsuit threatened by Judd led to the establishment of the Chinati Foundation with support from Dia. ''