New York, New York, December 5, 2023 – Today Dia announced the 2024 exhibition program across Dia Beacon, Dia Bridgehampton, and Dia Chelsea. The program includes a major, two-part presentation of work by Steve McQueen at both Dia Beacon and Dia Chelsea; three single-artist exhibitions that highlight acquisitions of work by Lucas Samaras, Keith Sonnier, and Meg Webster, at Dia Beacon; and a commission by Liliana Porter that opens in the summer at Dia Bridgehampton.

“2024 is an especially important year as we mark Dia’s 50th anniversary. Since our founding in 1974, Dia has remained committed to certain pillars: focusing on depth of engagement with each artist that we work with, offering unwavering support of artists’ visions, supporting the long-term display of artists’ work at our sites and beyond, and commissioning contemporary artists who bring new perspectives to the legacies of Minimal, Postminimal, and Conceptual art. Our 2024 exhibition program exemplifies these core tenets, with artists both new and familiar to Dia’s program presenting ambitious explorations in sound, light, time, and materiality,” said Jessica Morgan, Dia’s Nathalie de Gunzburg Director.

2024 Exhibition schedule at Dia Beacon, Dia Bridgehampton, and Dia Chelsea

Meg Webster
Opening February 16, 2024, long-term view
Dia Beacon

Drawing on Minimalist and Land art of the 1960s and ’70s, Meg Webster has brought loose natural materials—such as soil, sand, and salt—indoors since the mid-1980s, shaping them into elementary sculptures of amplified concentration. Her body of work spans simple geometric volumes, gardens, and hydraulic and grow-light installations that may be sited within or outside the gallery.

This long-term presentation of Webster’s work features her signature concave and convex earthworks, which recently entered Dia’s collection, complemented by sculptures constructed in beeswax, moss, salt, and sticks. Presented in the galleries abutting the West gardens, the exhibition’s organic materials comprise an ecosystem where color, scent, and sound enter into dialogue with the natural elements outside. Shown alongside works by peers Michael Heizer, Donald Judd, and Richard Serra, among others, Webster’s sculptures bring a unique ecological perspective to the formal concerns that animate the art in Dia’s collection.

Meg Webster is curated by Matilde Guidelli-Guidi, curator and co–department head.

Steve McQueen
May 12, 2024–April 2025
Dia Beacon

In a career spanning over 30 years, Steve McQueen has critically engaged with themes such as history, class, and race, through film, photography, and installation. Using projected light and sound, much like a sculptor or a painter, McQueen creates environments that resonate on multiple levels and go beyond the conventional frame of cinema. At Dia Beacon, the artist presents a new work, co-commissioned by Dia and Schaulager, Laurenz Foundation, Münchenstein, Switzerland, in which he builds upon past experiments that explore how light, color, and sound affect and upend our perception of space, time, and ourselves. McQueen transforms the 30,000-square-foot lower-level gallery into an immersive installation, journeying through the complete spectrum of visible light in concert with a sonic component that responds to the space.

Following Dia Beacon, the commission will travel to Schaulager where it will be adapted to the institution’s unique exhibition spaces.

The exhibition at Dia Beacon is complemented by a concurrent presentation of McQueen’s Sunshine State (2022) as well as a new monitor-based work at Dia Chelsea, opening September 2024.

Steve McQueen is curated by Donna De Salvo, senior adjunct curator, special projects, with Emily Markert, curatorial assistant, and Randy Gibson, manager of exhibition technology.

Liliana Porter
June 21, 2024—Spring 2025
Dia Bridgehampton

Dia presents a new commission by Liliana Porter in dialogue with the permanent Dan Flavin installation on the second floor of the Bridgehampton location. A central figure in the early Conceptual and feminist art movements, Porter has dedicated her practice to contesting the spaces between reality and fiction across a variety of mediums including prints, etchings, drawings, collages, photographs, works on canvas, installations, public art, and theater. Within her long-standing research, the subject of time—perceived as continuous although nonlinear and dislocated—has manifested itself in the artist’s early photographic works from the 1970s, but also in later works from the 1990s incorporating collected figurines and trinkets, as well as in films and, most recently, theatrical plays. In representing unexpected scenes that are both humorous and intriguing, occurring simultaneously and with open-ended meanings, Porter zooms in on the minute to reflect on complex notions of reality, temporality, representation, and space.

Liliana Porter is curated by Humberto Moro, deputy director of program, with Liv Cuniberti, curatorial assistant.

Steve McQueen
September 2024–January 2025
Dia Chelsea

Following the presentation of a new co-commission at Dia Beacon in spring 2024, this concurrent presentation at Dia Chelsea features a new monitor-based work by Steve McQueen, alongside a recent two-channel video, Sunshine State (2022), in the adjacent gallery. Sunshine State is displayed on both sides of two large screens, encouraging visitors to move through the space and view the work from either vantage point. Opening with footage of a burning sun, the work unfurls clips from the musical drama The Jazz Singer (1927), the first “talkie” in the history of cinema, starring the famous singer Al Jolson. In a voiceover, McQueen recounts a poignant story that his late father relayed on his deathbed about a personal experience of violent racism in Florida, giving the work its title. Originally commissioned by the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Sunshine State, through it’s Dia presentation, debuts on the East Coast of the United States, throwing its eponymous connection to Florida into sharp relief.

Steve McQueen is curated by Donna De Salvo, senior adjunct curator, special projects, with Emily Markert, curatorial assistant.

Lucas Samaras
Opening September 21, 2024, long-term view
Dia Beacon

For over 60 years, Lucas Samaras has worked fluidly between mediums in a manner that eludes categorization. The artist’s eccentric and uncanny objects often combine formal strategies of Minimalism with the haptic materiality of everyday objects. Such is the case with Cubes and Trapezoids (1993–94), which joined the collection in 2003 and will be presented at Dia Beacon for the first time since its 1994 debut at Pace Gallery in New York, together with a significant loan of one of the artist’s immersive mirrored rooms, Doorway (1966–2007).

The cubes consist of 24 totemic wooden volumes, with cutouts of various geometrical shapes, that are arranged in an expansive grid. The related wall-works, the trapezoids, are made up of eight irregular quadrilateral forms nestled within uniform rectangles. The non-reflective surfaces of the trapezoids, which nonetheless respond to light, complement the mirrored panels of Doorway. Together these psychologically charged objects literally and materially evoke the body, perverting the analytical geometries of Minimalism with the messy realities of identity and interiority.

Lucas Samaras is curated by Jordan Carter, curator and co–department head, with Liv Cuniberti, curatorial assistant.

Keith Sonnier
Opening November 9, 2024, long-term view
Dia Beacon

This long-term presentation brings together a selection of recently acquired works from the late 1960s and early ’70s by Keith Sonnier, highlighting the artist’s experiments across media. During this period Sonnier pursued what he termed “psychologically loaded” industrial materials, referring to those with strong connotations to their non-art usages. The exhibition features elements emblematic of Sonnier’s practice, like cloth, flocking, latex, neon, and satin—commonplace fragments found scattered about the home and the urban environment—which he combines into dynamic objects and installations. Additionally, the presentation at Dia includes Dis-Play II (1970), a room-size installation of foam rubber, fluorescent powder, strobe light, black light, neon, and glass, which was previously on view at Dia Bridgehampton from 2018 to 2019. 

Keith Sonnier is curated by Jordan Carter, curator and co–department head.

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 long-standing 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
• 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
• Cameron Rowland’s Depreciation (2018)

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