New York, NY - Dia Art Foundation presents its 34th Artist Project for the Web by artist Sue Tompkins, entitled My Kind Book (2011). In this new work, Tompkins has created a typewritten manuscript in the format of a web-based book. An audio recording of her reading the text plays as the visitor peruses the pages online. The project can be seen on Dia's website beginning December 8, 2011 at www.diaart.org/tompkins.

At the project launch, Tompkins will perform Hallo Welcome to Keith Street (2010), followed by a conversation with Dia curator Yasmil Raymond. This event will begin at 6:30 pm on Thursday, December 8, 2011 at Dia:Chelsea, 535 West 22nd Street, 5th Floor, in New York City, and the performance will start at 7 pm.

Equally known for her installations that combine typewritten text pieces, music, cloth paintings, and objects, as well as her pared-down spoken-word performances, Sue Tompkins continues her fragmented and evocative text-driven work in the web-based book, My Kind Book. Tompkins's career has evolved from her training as a painter and her elemental role in the acclaimed, but short-lived art rock band, Life Without Buildings, into a practice that simultaneously manifests in both performance-based works such as Country Grammar (2003), Elephants Galore (2005), and Grease (2006), and in shifting, yet remarkably emotive text-based installations that explore various meanings and implications of language. Echoing the distinctive rhythmic style of her sound-infused performances, My Kind Book layers Tompkins's typewritten poetic text with original audio triggered by the audience's journey through the work's multilayered digital collage.

Artists' Projects for the Web
Dia initiated a series of web-based artworks in early 1995, becoming one of the first arts organizations to foster the use of the World Wide Web as an artistic and conceptual medium. Dia currently has 33 web projects in its collection, and recent commissions include Cecelia Edefalk's 24-Hour Venus (2010), Lisi Raskin's Warning Warum (2009), Dorit Margreiter's alphabet (2009), Liliana Porter's Rehearsal (2008), Barbara Bloom's Half Full-Half Empty (2008), Rosa Barba's Vertiginous Mapping (2008), Ezra Johnson's Wrestling with the Blob Beast (2008), and Wilfredo Prieto's A Moment of Silence (2007), among others. To view these projects, visit www.diaart.org/artist_web_projects.

Funding
This commission is made possible in part by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the New York State Council on the Arts, a State agency. Beverages for the launch event compliments of Brooklyn Brewery.

Sue Tompkins
Sue Tompkins was born in 1971 in Leighton Buzzard, in Central Bedfordshire, United Kingdom. Since graduating from the Glasgow School of Art in 1994 where she studied painting, Tompkins has been shown internationally in exhibitions at Inverleith House, Edinburgh (2011); Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis (2009); ICA, London (2009); Nam June Paik Art Center, Seoul (2009); Kunsthalle Basel (2008); Tate Modern, London (2007); Galerie Diana Stigter, Amsterdam (2007); Tate Britain, London (2006); Modern Institute/Toby Webster Ltd, Glasgow (2006); Doggerfisher, Edinburgh (2003); and Stavanger Kulturhus, Norway (2003).

She has performed independently, as well as collaboratively, at such venues as National Portrait Gallery, London (2011); Hayward Gallery, London (2011); Nottingham Castle (2010); Spike Island, Bristol (2007); West London Projects, London (2005); and Switchspace, Glasgow (2004). She has also exhibited in the São Paulo Bienal (2010); Athens Biennale (2009); Momentum 2006: the 4th Nordic Festival of Contemporary Art, Moss, Norway (2006); and Art Forum Berlin (with Hayley Tompkins, 2005). She currently lives and works in Northamptonshire, United Kingdom.

Dia Art Foundation
A nonprofit institution founded in 1974, Dia Art Foundation is renowned for initiating, supporting, presenting, and preserving art projects. Dia:Beacon, Riggio Galleries, opened in May 2003 in Beacon, New York, on the banks of the Hudson River as the home for Dia’s distinguished collection of art from the 1960s to the present. The museum, which occupies a former Nabisco printing factory, features major installations of works by a focused group of some of the most significant artists of the last half century, as well as special exhibitions, new commissions, and diverse public and education programs. Dia:Chelsea is located on West 22nd Street in the heart of New York City’s gallery district which it helped to pioneer. Currently open for artist lectures and readings, Dia is developing plans to expand its presence in Chelsea.

Dia also maintains long-term, site-specific projects. These include Walter De Maria’s The New York Earth Room (1977) and The Broken Kilometer (1979), Max Neuhaus’s Times Square (1977), Joseph Beuys’s 7000 Eichen (7000 Oaks) (1988), and Dan Flavin’s untitled (1996), in Manhattan; The Dan Flavin Art Institute, in Bridgehampton, New York; De Maria’s Vertical Earth Kilometer (1977), in Kassel, Germany; Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970), in the Great Salt Lake, Utah; and De Maria’s The Lightning Field (1977), in Quemado, New Mexico. For additional public information, visit www.diaart.org.