NEW YORK, NY.- Dia Art Foundation announced the reopening of Dia Beacon and Dia Bridgehampton and an updated exhibition schedule at these locations for 2020, following four months of COVID-19–related closures. Both sites will reopen with new protocols to ensure the safety of staff and visitors. Dia Bridgehampton will reopen on July 25, 2020, followed by Dia Beacon on August 7, 2020. The reopening dates for Walter De Maria’s The New York Earth Room (1977) and The Broken Kilometer (1979) will be announced later this summer.

“Art provides inspiration, education, and joy during difficult times, and our communities need that now in a different and more urgent way than ever before,” said Jessica Morgan, Dia’s Nathalie de Gunzburg director. “Our team has been working diligently behind-the-scenes to plan for our various reopenings and to ensure everyone’s safety. I am thrilled to welcome our community back to Dia Beacon and Dia Bridgehampton and provide them with the opportunity to engage with art again.”

Both Dia Beacon and Dia Bridgehampton will offer reduced opening hours. Enhanced cleaning protocols and visitor procedures are in place to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Face coverings are required for staff and visitors and capacity inside the buildings is limited. Visitors are asked to refrain from entering if, over the last fourteen days, they have had symptoms or tested positive for COVID-19, have been in close contact with someone diagnosed with COVID-19, or have visited a high infection area.




Updated 2020 Exhibition Schedule at Dia Beacon and Dia Bridgehampton
In addition to the updates listed below, exhibitions of work by Joan Jonas and Keith Sonnier at Dia Beacon will now take place in fall 2021 and spring 2022 respectively.

Mel Bochner
Now Extended Through May 9, 2021
Dia Beacon
On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Mel Bochner’s first Measurement room in 2019, Dia has commissioned the artist to realize a new, large-scale work from his Measurement series at Dia Beacon. Regarded as one of the leading American Conceptual and Postminimal artists in the 1960s and 1970s, Bochner pioneered the play between the characteristics of numerical values, space, and language in his work.

In May 1969 Bochner realized the first works in his ongoing Measurement series, using black tape to draw simple, linear segments across the surfaces of Dia cofounder Heiner Friedrich’s Munich gallery. Punctuating these lines were numbers that corresponded to the length of the measured surface: the width of a window bay, the height of a doorframe, and so on. In this work, as in subsequent iterations of this series, Bochner used lines to wrap around the architectural envelope of the gallery in a systematic evaluation of its spatial parameters and the perceptual experience that unfolds within it. At Dia Beacon, red tape maps the various surfaces of one of the museum’s largest galleries, running horizontally across walls at a height corresponding to the artist’s eye level.

Barry Le Va
Now Extended Through May 9, 2021
Dia Beacon
Originally trained as an architect, Barry Le Va began creating horizontally dispersed sculptures while he was a student at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles. Though seemingly random—and emblematic of chance-based operations—these radical works are rigorously planned and arranged for each site-dependent installation.

This survey of Le Va’s floor-based installations from the 1960s includes two of his rarely seen powder dispersals, which have been reconfigured for a site-dependent space at Dia Beacon. These installations are based on Omitted Section of a Section Omitted (1968–69), which was first presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials exhibition in 1969, and Le Va’s series of Brown Line chalk sculptures (also from 1969). Le Va’s dispersals push the notion of sculpture to its formal limits and challenge the stark, industrially fabricated forms of Minimalism. The presentation also includes several of Le Va’s signature floor works that utilize felt, ball bearings, and broken glass. In an adjoining gallery, the artist has conceived an installation from his Cleaver series.

Carl Craig
Now Extended Through Summer 2021
Dia Beacon
Acclaimed Detroit-based techno DJ and producer Carl Craig has been commissioned by Dia to create a sound installation in dialogue with the unique architecture of one of the largest galleries at Dia Beacon. Party/After-Party (2020) marks his first commission for an art institution and culminates a five-year-long engagement with Dia. This sound installation reimagines Dia Beacon’s lower level, creating a sonic environment that is anchored to the site’s manufacturing history as a former Nabisco packaging factory and recalling the techno tradition of reclaiming industrial spaces for radical experimentation. The work accesses both the euphoria of the club environment and the loneliness that follows this collective experience. This new commission continues Dia’s long-term support for experimentation across media, as well as its commitment to fostering music and sound-based programming at the institution’s various sites. In conjunction with the commission, Dia is hosting the Carl Craig Sessions, a cumulative platform of public programs exploring the legacy of techno through summer 2021.

Jill Magid
July 25, 2020–June 6, 2021
Dia Bridgehampton
Dia presents a yearlong installation of new work by the Conceptual artist, writer, and filmmaker Jill Magid. Magid’s practice interrogates structures of power on an intimate level, exploring the emotional, philosophical, and legal tensions that exist between institutions and individual agency. For her exhibition at Dia Bridgehampton, Magid presents the series Homage CMYK (2019), consisting of eleven four-channel screenprints on linen hung to fit the gallery in an immersive installation. In dialogue with Dan Flavin’s permanent display of fluorescent light works on the second floor of the building, the layered, luminous surfaces of Homage CMYK call into question authorship, influence, and how an object changes in relation to its context over time.

This series takes as its departure point two unlicensed screenprints on linen derived from Josef Albers’s iconic series Homage to the Square (1950–75) that hang in Mexican architect Luis Barragán’s library and living room at his preserved Mexico City home. To make Homage CMYK, Magid scanned photographic reproductions of these copies, cropped the skewed works, and manipulated them back into their intended square format, finally printing them again in their original size and support—now layered with multiple reproduction processes, including commercial printing, photography, book publication, and Photoshop.

Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme
Launching Online November 2020
Artist Web Projects
Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme present a new online work as part of Dia’s series of Artist Web Projects, the longest-running web art commissioning series in the United States, all of which are accessible for free online. May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth (2020) is a multipart project that will unfold over the course of one year. It will launch on Dia’s website with a digital postscript, which is centered on the idea of being in a constant state of mourning, as experienced between physical and virtual spaces. The project will evolve to focus on the artists’ archived collection of online recordings, which feature performances by anonymous dancers, musicians, and singers in Iraq, Palestine, and Syria, as well as a series of recordings of performances by electronic musicians and dancers from Palestine. Challenging censorship in the virtual space, May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth assembles a body of knowledge in defiance of its continuous digital erasure.

Mario Merz
Opening November 2020, Long-Term View
Dia Beacon
Featuring Dia’s recent acquisitions and historical loans from collections in the United States and the Fondazione Merz in Turin, this long-term exhibition foregrounds key forms and motifs that animate the artist’s radical oeuvre. Mario Merz was a central figure in the Arte Povera movement, which emerged in Italy in the midst of an international wave of sociopolitical uprisings in the late 1960s. Formally related to Postminimalism in the United States and Mono-ha (School of Things) in Japan, Arte Povera adopted an aesthetic that challenged the traditional values placed on art objects by dissolving sculpture into performance. Spanning the mid-1960s through the mid-1980s, the exhibition reveals key forms and motifs present throughout Merz’s conceptually rigorous and visionary practice such as his signature igloos and tables, distinctive use of neon, and deployment of the Fibonacci sequence—where each number equals the sum of the two that precede it—for the structure of his installations.