New York, New York, May 1, 2024 – Dia Art Foundation today announced the launch of an interactive timeline to celebrate the institution’s 50th anniversary. Featuring over 100 events that span the past 50 years, the timeline traverses exhibitions, locations, projects, partnerships, and programs that come to life through photographs, videos, and ephemera—many of which are sourced from Dia’s extensive archive and have never been seen before. The website is designed by Pentagram and programmed by AREA 17.

“Dia is an organization like no other, with a fascinating history. This website will give our audiences an opportunity to dive deep into our relationships with artists, iconic artworks realized with Dia’s support, understand our founding mission and how it informs Dia to this day, and much more. I am particularly pleased that, for the first time, we are able to share some of our rich archive, which has not been publicly available until now. I can think of no better way to mark 50 years of Dia,” said Jessica Morgan, Dia’s Nathalie de Gunzburg Director.

In 1974, Fariha Friedrich, Heiner Friedrich, and Helen Winkler Fosdick founded Dia to help artists achieve visionary projects that might not otherwise be realized because of scale or scope. Today, Dia remains committed to those pillars, including a focus on in-depth engagement with each artist, 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. Today, Dia is a constellation of three exhibition spaces—Dia Beacon, Dia Bridgehampton, and Dia Chelsea—and nine permanent artist sites in the U.S. and Germany.

Explore 50 years of Dia’s history here.

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
• 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: 

Dia Art Foundation
(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