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He says he approached Dia:Beacon as an artist rather than an architect. Everything is interactive,” says Dia artist Robert Irwin, who began in the 1950s as an abstract painter and who, along with Dia Art Foundation director Michael Govan, was responsible for creating a master plan for the renovation of the factory and the design of outdoor spaces. Without a viewer’s response, they felt, their art was incomplete.

Why did a sculpture have to sit on a pedestal and occupy space? Why did a painting have to be something you stood in front of and looked at? Why did it have to stop at the edges? Did art have to be an object at all? Many of the 20 or so artists represented at Beacon-a hugely influential group that includes Louise Bourgeois, Dan Flavin, Walter DeMaria, Michael Heizer, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Agnes Martin, Robert Ryman, Richard Serra and Andy Warhol-began their careers intent on challenging some basic assumptions about art. “It’s totally committed to giving an art that is not necessarily ingratiating an environment where it has the best chance to speak in its own right.” Wood, director and president of the Art Institute of Chicago. “What makes this museum very special is its focus on a relatively small number of artists who are shown in great depth in circumstances as close to perfect as any space I have seen,” says James N. “Difficult” art becomes accessible, the thinking goes, when a viewer’s response is visceral.

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And Walter De Maria’s Equal Area Series (12 pairs of flattened, stainless-steel circles and squares that lie on the floor like giant washers for some enormous machine) extends through two galleries totaling 22,000 square feet.Most of these works cannot be seen in their entirety from any one place you must walk in, around, and in some cases, within them, as in a landscape. John Chamberlain’s sculpture Privet, for instance, is a 62-foot-long, 13-foot-high hedge fashioned out of scraps of chrome and painted steel. Most of the outsize works on view in Dia:Beacon’s immense skylit galleries fill a room or more. At Dia:Beacon, says artist Robert Irwin, who helped transform the 1929 Nabisco box- printing factory in Beacon, New York, into a radiant showcase for art, “the viewer is responsible for setting in motion his own meaning.” It exhibits a concentration of monumental works (many seldom, if ever, seen in public) by land artists, minimalist artists, conceptual artists and installation artists. “The idea of being an hour-plus away from New York City is more important than being close to it.”ĭia:Beacon has 240,000 square feet of exhibition space, which is more than that of New York City’s Guggenheim, Whitney and Museum of Modern Art combined. “These artists were inspired more by the American landscape and the American spirit than by the SoHo art scene,” says collector Leonard Riggio, chairman of the Dia Art Foundation, which created the museum.

Many of the artists whose works went on permanent display this past May at Dia:Beacon, as the new museum is called, put space between themselves and an art world they saw as compromised and overly commercial. Visit Dia: Beacon at 3 Beekman Street, Beacon, NY.It’s only fitting that the most eagerly awaited museum in the world of contemporary art is more than an hour removed from New York City’s frenetic art scene. Dia is a constellation of sites, from the iconic permanent, site-specific artworks and installations in New York, the American West, and Germany to an exhibition program that has commissioned dozens of breakthrough projects. The museum offers art exhibitions, lectures, and talks, performances and web projects – programs of education and public engagement. To suggest the institution’s role in enabling such ambitions, they selected the name “Dia,” taken from the Greek word meaning “through.” breakthrough projects to the vast galleries of Dia: Beacon. Dia: Beacon is located on the banks of the majestic Hudson River in Beacon, NY in a former Nabisco box-printing factory and has helped to transform the city into a vibrant arts destination for visitors from the region, New York City, and beyond.ĭia was founded in New York City in 1974 by Philippa de Menil, Heiner Friedrich, and Helen Winkler to help artists achieve visionary projects that might not otherwise be realized because of scale or scope.

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