Beacon, New York, March 5, 2024 – Today Dia announced a major landscape project at Dia Beacon. Designed by landscape firm Studio Zewde, the project will open an additional eight acres of Dia’s 32-acre campus to the public. Covering a swathe of land located in the back of Dia’s iconic former–Nabisco Box Factory building, the project will create an expanded outdoor and free amenity for visitors and locals alike. Importantly, the project is engineered to add significant stormwater resilience to the site as well as to convert over three acres of lawn to native meadowlands. Construction will begin in summer 2024, with the landscape opening to the public in 2025.

“The landscape surrounding Dia Beacon has always been essential to the experience of the museum. In renovating the abandoned factory building, the interior of the galleries, the forecourt, the adjacent gardens, and even the parking lot were all designed by the renowned late artist Robert Irwin. This new project extends this immersive approach to site, and Studio Zewde have introduced an extensive, undulating meadowland—all of which will be free to the public. Their design for the south landscape responds holistically to the location, its histories, and current conditions, as well as Dia’s own connection with Land art,” said Jessica Morgan, Dia’s Nathalie de Gunzburg Director.

“History’s impressions on the land that now hosts Dia Beacon inspire our design for the landscape. Our work together with Dia Art Foundation has been a process of listening, seeing, and amplifying the patterns of movement, water, material, and culture across the site over time. The design’s landforms, the meadows, and the embrace of water in the landscape are a means of managing the 21st-century challenge of rising water but are also a means of remembering. We are honored to be working with Dia on this project of opening up eight acres of land to public access,” said Sara Zewde, Studio Zewde’s founding principal.

The design of the new landscape considers time, water, and Indigenous movements through the land, as well as Dia Beacon’s existing landscape, designed by Robert Irwin in 2003 and located to the front of the building. Echoing Dia’s name—the ancient Greek word for “through”—sweeping sculptural hills with east-west pathways through meadowland nod to the patterns of water moving through the floodplain, as well as an adjacent historical Indigenous river crossing, while allowing the public to move through this landscape.

As extreme weather becomes a fact of life globally, Dia Beacon’s location on the banks of the Hudson River makes bolstering resistance to rising water ever more important. Studio Zewde’s design for the landscape choreographs the presence of water through the site via the landforms and extensive meadowland, as well as underground storage; all designed to manage and express a range of water levels.

Meadowlands planted with more than 90 native meadow species and nearly 400 new trees and shrubs are designed to support water management, as well as change seasonally with the flowering, texture, and color of the different plant and tree species. A small lawn area also opens up the possibilities for outdoor public programming and engagement.

With the opening of Dia Beacon’s expanded landscape in 2025, day-tripping museum-goers and the local community will have access to a public space that celebrates movement, seasonality, water management, and engagement with a changing landscape.

The forthcoming landscape project is designed by Studio Zewde, in conjunction with Sherwood Design Engineers, LWLA (Larry Weaner Landscape Associates), and Pine & Swallow Environmental. The project is part of a comprehensive multiyear campaign to advance Dia’s mission, program, resources, and facilities.

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)

About Studio Zewde

Studio Zewde is a vibrant landscape, urban design, and public art practice based in New York. The firm’s work is lauded for its design methodology that syncs site interpretation with cultural narrative and a dedication to the craft of construction. A 100 percent Black woman–owned firm, our team has backgrounds in landscape architecture, architecture, city planning, urban design, sociology, statistics, community organizing, soil science, textile design, and public art.

Named to Architectural Digest’s AD100 and an Emerging Voice by the Architectural League of New York, our practice is recognized for its ability to design meaningfully for people and their stories. Recognized on the cover of Landscape Architecture Magazine as leading “the way forward for memorials everywhere,” we are devoted to creating enduring places where people belong.

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