New York, NY, October 10, 2023 – Today Dia Art Foundation and the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA) announced a long-term partnership. The collaboration will advance the objectives of both institutions—Dia’s of supporting the visionary projects of artists and ISLAA’s of expanding the scholarship, public engagement, and international visibility of art from Latin America. Spanning exhibitions, publications, public programs, and educational initiatives, this affiliation will expand Dia’s canon by deepening the institution’s engagement with Latin American artists and thinkers, facilitating multilingual publications that reach new audiences, and allowing Dia to present ambitious projects from a diverse group of Latin American artists.

“We are thrilled to begin this partnership with ISLAA, an organization so aligned with Dia in their dedication to fostering and expanding relationships with a specific groups of artists. This multiyear collaboration will help us grow Dia’s engagement with Latin American artists, who are vital to telling the story of Minimal, Postminimal, and Conceptual art on a global scale,” said Jessica Morgan, Dia’s Nathalie de Gunzburg Director.

“The upcoming projects being realized at Dia through ISLAA’s vital support and collaboration represent important developments in Dia’s long-term goals. These projects—which will take a multiplicity of forms, including commissions, historical surveys, publications, and public programs—continue institutional efforts to expand our research and bring new perspectives to explore notions of land, sound, and time, all core tenets of Dia’s program,” said Humberto Moro, Dia’s deputy director of program.

“After many years of collaboration with Humberto Moro, it is particularly gratifying to embark on this series of projects with Dia, each of which will support our shared mission to expand narratives and foster conversations about the contributions of Latin American art and artists,” said Ariel Aisiks, ISLAA’s founder.

Beginning in July 2023 and continuing over the coming years, the efforts will center around three key projects at Dia:

• The first US solo presentation of acclaimed Colombian artist Delcy Morelos’s work, a site-specific exhibition commissioned by Dia, will open in Chelsea in October 2023. The exhibition will consist of two monumental installations that take soil, territory, and topography as their points of departure. Morelos is known for immersive earth installations that situate audiences in a singular landscape or site and draw on the fertility of earth and land as sacred sources as well as the sites of violent cultural constructions, bringing both subjects into acute conversation. The commission will be accompanied by a multilingual book dedicated to the artist’s soil-based practice, including a folio of matrilineal origin stories in the Witoto language. The richly illustrated monograph will direct scholarly attention to an important new voice in Latin American art.
• Echoes from the Borderland, a24-hour polyphonic intervention, documents the sonic traces of the US/Mexico border’s violent history, beginning in the mid-19^th century and bringing listeners to the maquilas, mines, and detention centers of today. Developed by three important Mexican figures—author and MacArthur Fellow Valeria Luiselli, composer and sound artist Leonardo Heiblum, and multimedia artist Ricardo Giraldo—the project blends narratives, soundscapes, music, and archival footage. Echoes from the Borderland will manifest in iterative activations that engage audiences in the work in process, both at the geographic border and wherever the violence of the border is at work, including New York City.
• An exhibition by pathbreaking Argentinian Conceptual artist David Lamelas will open at Dia Chelsea in spring 2026. Centering on the notion of time and spanning film, video, performance, sculpture, photography, installation, and drawing, Lamelas’s work is a key addition to Dia’s long-term engagement with Conceptual art from the 1960s and ‘70s. 

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 
• Cameron Rowland’s Depreciation (2018)

About the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA)      
Since 2011, the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA) has expanded scholarship, public engagement, and the international visibility of art from Latin America through its program of exhibitions, publishing, research, and partnerships. These programs frequently engage the ISLAA Collection of modern and contemporary Latin American art, which is in dialogue with the contents of the ISLAA Library and Archives. ISLAA provides a platform for original perspectives on a variety of figures, topics, and periods of Latin American art through its in-house exhibition program and curatorial partnerships.

ISLAA works with educational and art institutions to foster scholarship and intellectual exchange, providing resources and programs oriented toward scholars, arts professionals, and broad audiences. These partnerships include the ISLAA Forum, a series of graduate student workshops; the Artist Seminar Initiative, which supports coursework and on-campus exhibitions; ISLAA’s decade-long, multifaceted partnerships with Columbia University and the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University; and support of the Jaime Davidovich Foundation.           

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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