New York, NY, December 13 – Today Dia announced its exhibition program for 2023 across its three primary exhibition spaces: Dia Beacon, Dia Bridgehampton, and Dia Chelsea. The program includes two exhibitions at Dia Chelsea opening over the course of the year: a comprehensive survey of work by Chryssa and a new commission by Delcy Morelos. Dia Beacon will showcase three exhibitions of recent acquisitions from Senga Nengudi, stanley brouwn, and Rita McBride, respectively; presentations of work by Mary Heilmann and Maren Hassinger; and the reinstallation of Andy Warhol’s iconic multipart Shadows (1978–79). Meanwhile, a new commission by Tony Cokes will go on display at Dia Bridgehampton.

“Our upcoming exhibitions in 2023 underscore several key elements of Dia’s unique approach: acquiring work in depth, sustained dialogues with artists over a long period of time, and commissioning artists who engage, expand, and challenge the legacies of Minimal, Postminimal, and Conceptual art in new and relevant ways,” said Jessica Morgan, Dia’s Nathalie de Gunzburg Director. “As we reflect on the twentieth anniversary of Dia Beacon this coming year, it is exciting to see how our collection has evolved while remaining true to our core mission to center the vision of artists. We look forward to welcoming visitors to these exhibitions, as well as to all of our permanent artist sites in the United States and beyond.”

In March, the first major survey of work by Chryssa in North America since 1982 starts its national tour at Dia Chelsea. Co-organized with the Menil Collection, Houston, this exhibition brings together major loans from American and European museums and collections. Following this show, a substantial new commission by Delcy Morelos, which explores the artist’s longstanding interest in earth as material, opens in October. Morelos’s work will be on view for one year. 

The exhibition program at Dia Beacon highlights recent acquisitions and engagements within the context of Dia’s rich collection. Three artists whose work has recently entered the foundation’s permanent holdings will stage exhibitions, beginning in February with a presentation of sculptures and room-sized installations by Senga Nengudi. In April, an exhibition of work by stanley brouwn will also feature a recent acquisition. Centering around Rita McBride’s interactive sculpture Arena (1997), an exhibition of the artist’s work opens in July. The acquisition of Arena follows McBride’s 2017 commission for Dia, Particulates. In the fall, bodies of work by Maren Hassinger and Mary Heilmann, both of whom recently exhibited at Dia Bridgehampton, will go on long-term view. Finally, in September, a collection display of Andy Warhol’s much-loved Shadows will return to Dia Beacon.

Opening in June at Dia Bridgehampton, a yearlong exhibition by Tony Cokes will feature new work conceived in dialogue with the space.

2023 Exhibition Schedule at Dia Beacon, Dia Bridgehampton, and Dia Chelsea

Senga Nengudi
Opening February 17, long-term view
Dia Beacon

Over her five-decade-long career, Senga Nengudi has realized a remarkable body of work that blurs the boundaries between sculpture and performance, fine art and ritual, individual authorship and collective energy. Made of everyday materials such as vinyl, water, nylon, sand, dry-cleaning bags, lint, paper, and tape, Nengudi’s installations are at once proxies for bodies and sites for performance. The works accommodate a variety of cultural references from African, Japanese, and South Asian rites to Western avant-garde art. Dia’s long-term exhibition of Nengudi’s work will be accompanied by a performance program and publication, revealing the multiplicity of her practice. Sculptures and room-sized installations from the years 1969 to 2020 will be on display at Dia Beacon, including recent acquisitions in Dia’s permanent collection. Performances at Dia Beacon and partnering venues will activate and complement the sculptural presentation, and an artist’s book will collect, for the first time, Nengudi’s drawings, photographs, prints, poems, performance instructions, and other writings. 

Chryssa & New York
March 2–July 23
Dia Chelsea

Co-organized by Dia Art Foundation and the Menil Collection, Chryssa & New York is the first comprehensive survey of works by Greek-born artist Chryssa (1933–2013) to take place in North America since 1982. The exhibition will premiere at Dia Chelsea, New York, in March 2023 and will travel to the Menil Collection, Houston, in September 2023 and Wrightwood 659, Chicago, in May 2024. A leading figure of the New York art world in the 1950s and ’60s, Chryssa developed an innovative approach to activating sculptural surfaces through subtle manipulations of light and shadow. Pathbreaking in its use of signage, text, and neon, her vastly underrecognized body of work bridges Pop, Conceptual, and Minimalist ideas of art making. This exhibition focuses on works from these decades through to the early 1970s, bringing together Chryssa’s deeply formal concerns and critical interest in exploring the United States following World War II.   

stanley brouwn
Opening April 15, long-term view
Dia Beacon 

Tony Cokes
June 23, 2023–May 2024
Dia Bridgehampton

Since the late 1980s, Tony Cokes has appropriated and remixed text, music, and documentary images into videos and installations that investigate the interrelations of politics, popular culture, race, and identity. At Dia Bridgehampton, Cokes presents a new work in dialogue with the material histories of the site, a former firehouse–turned–First Baptist Church. The artist also responds to the permanent Dan Flavin installation on the second floor, which resonates with Cokes’s own conceptual and formal interests in radiant, monochromatic color and light, as well as his increasingly sculptural and context-specific approach to moving-image installations.

Rita McBride
Opening July, long-term view
Dia Beacon 

On view in the central corridors of Dia Beacon and centered around the recent acquisition of Rita McBride’s Arena (1997)—a modular sculpture that is activated by the presence of audiences and performers alike—this exhibition explores the artist’s longstanding interest in architecture, design, and sculpture as they relate to the public sphere in forms such as seating structures, guidance systems, and commercial awnings. As McBride explains, Arena is “an ongoing investigation into the ways in which exhibition space, sculpture, and audience communicate and engage.” Arena is meant to be looked at, sat on, and engaged by visitors in an open, ongoing process that is punctuated by choreographed performances. At Dia Beacon these will consist of a performance series, Momentum, developed in collaboration with the artist, choreographer Alexandra Waierstall, and the experimental collective discoteca flaming star.   

Maren Hassinger
Opening fall, long-term view
Dia Beacon

Spanning over five decades, Maren Hassinger’s practice bridges fiber arts, installation, performance, and sculpture. Since the 1970s, after first encountering wire rope in a junkyard while pursuing her master’s degree in fiber arts, Hassinger has sourced and manipulated the material to both physically and conceptually tease out its organic attributes. Exemplary of this approach, Field (1983) is an expansive grid of individual bundles of industrial steel cable each held together by a cement base. The work evokes, as the artist describes, an “industrial field” where human-made products emulate nature in its absence. Installed in close collaboration with the artist, this context-specific presentation at Dia Beacon marks the first time Field has been exhibited in over thirty years.

Mary Heilmann
Opening fall, long-term view
Dia Beacon

Mary Heilmann’s exhibition at Dia Beacon will mark the first dedicated presentation of the Starry Night series (1967–71) since its 1971 debut at Paley and Lowe Gallery in New York. For this series, Heilmann produced a group of unstretched canvases stained black and named after astronomical constellations, even binding a collection of them into a large, children’s book–like work known as The Book of Night (1970). Complementing these canvases are celestial clay or bamboo objects coated in flock, a type of textured fiber, that lean, protrude, or hang high from the wall, bringing the artist’s constructed galaxy into the space of the viewer. These works engage formal, conceptual, and cosmological notions of light and dark, evoking constellations through cut-outs, glitter, and other ad hoc material strategies.

Delcy Morelos
October 6, 2023–July 2024
Dia Chelsea

Artist Delcy Morelos is developing a new commission for Dia Chelsea that takes soil, territory, and topography as its points of departure. For her installations, the artist will coat the surfaces of one gallery with dirt and stacked soil-encrusted objects; in the other, she will build a mountainous earthen form. Morelos’s practice considers the interdependencies between natural and built environments through the framework of Indigenous relations to land. In these works, material accumulation and monochromatic expanse collapse distinctions between volume and surface, interiority and exteriority. Since 2012 Morelos has been interested in the cosmologies of ancestral Andean and Amazonian cultures, her own and others, focusing particularly on the sustaining powers of water and clay in these origin stories. Her immersive installations aim to cultivate moments of connection with what she describes as the “intimate humidity of the earth.”

Andy Warhol
Opening October, long-term view
Dia Beacon

Andy Warhol’s Shadows (1978–79) returns to Dia Beacon for long-term view in September 2023. A single painting in multiple parts, Shadows is one of Warhol’s most abstract works, yet one that cohesively synthesizes key elements of his practice, including film, painting, photography, and screenprinting. Originally commissioned by Dia and acquired in 1979 for a solo exhibition at 393 West Broadway in New York, Shadows includes a total of 102 canvases; the final number of canvases on view in each installation is determined by the dimensions of an existing exhibition space. 

About Dia Art Foundation

Taking its name from the Greek word meaning “through,” Dia was established in 1974 with the mission to serve as a conduit for artists to realize ambitious new projects, unmediated by overt interpretation and uncurbed by the limitations of more traditional museums and galleries. Dia’s programming fosters contemplative and sustained consideration of a single artist’s body of work and its collection is distinguished by the deep and longstanding relationships that the nonprofit has cultivated with artists whose work came to prominence particularly in the 1960s and ’70s. 

In addition to Dia Beacon, Dia Bridgehampton, 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. These include: 

• Walter De Maria’s The New York Earth Room(1977) and The Broken Kilometer (1979), Max Neuhaus’s Times Square (1977), and Joseph Beuys’s 7000 Eichen (7000 Oaks, inaugurated in 1982 and ongoing), all located in New York City
• De Maria’s The Lightning Field(1977), in western New Mexico
• Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty(1970), in the Great Salt Lake, Utah
• Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels(1973–76), in the Great Basin Desert, Utah
• De Maria’s The Vertical Earth Kilometer(1977), in Kassel, Germany 

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For additional information or materials, contact: 
(U.S. press inquiries)

Hannah Gompertz, Dia Art Foundation, hgompertz@diaart.org, +1 212 293 5598
Melissa Parsoff, Parsoff Communications, mparsoff@parsoff-communications.com, +1 516 445 5899

(International press inquiries)
Sam Talbot, sam@sam-talbot.com, +44 (0) 772 5184 630