Plans for the Dia Art Foundation to build a new home in Manhattan have been scrapped. Jessica Morgan, who took up her post as director in January, says she is “not pursuing” the project started by the previous head, Philippe Vergne, who planned to construct a new building on the footprint of two of Dia’s three existing sites in the city.
Instead, Morgan is exploring other ways to re-establish Dia’s presence in Chelsea. The former Tate Modern curator has already re-launched the space at 545 West 22nd Street, which went unused for ten years, with an exhibition of La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela’s Dream House (until 24 October). The multi-media installation was the first permanent acquisition Dia made after Morgan started her new job.
A survey of works by the Minimalist artist Robert Ryman—his first in the US for more than 20 years—is due to open in the same space on 9 December (until 18 June 2016). After that, Morgan says she “will probably shift to more contemporary commissions”. She says she is talking to a number of artists, but that it is too early to confirm who is in the running.
“I want to be programming constantly in Chelsea again because it makes no sense to have this incredible real estate and to be renting it out,” Morgan says. “It’s essential that we have a presence in the city.” Dia has two other spaces in Chelsea: 535 West 22nd Street, where talks are held on the floor above the foundation’s offices, and 541 West 22nd Street, which is used for temporary events.
Morgan hints that the buildings might be reconfigured at some point, but nothing has been finalised. “I am keen to keep to the Dia ethos of renovating, with a light touch, industrial architecture,” she says. The money raised towards Vergne’s project is “still there”, Morgan adds, but “since the scope of the project may change, the budget may change too”.
Just as pressing, Morgan says, is the need to bring “equilibrium” to all of Dia’s spaces. She is overseeing a rehang at the organisation’s outpost in Beacon, upstate New York, and recently opened a two-year exhibition of Dan Flavin’s icons at the Dia-run institute dedicated to the artist in Bridgehampton (until 30 April 2017). “It’s about bringing more attention and energy to our different sites. They are all equally important,” she says.
As part of the rehang at Dia:Beacon, the former Nabisco factory that houses the organisation’s collection of mainly 1960s and 1970s art, several works that have rarely—or never—been seen are getting an outing. They include the maquettes for Richard Serra’s Torqued Ellipses, Joseph Beuys’s Drawings After the Codices Madrid of Leonardo da Vinci (1974), Walter De Maria’s Equal Area series (1976-77) and several works by Flavin.
“Almost 50% of our collection is on show,” Morgan says. “It’s an incredible thing when so many museums have almost all of their collections in storage. I’m very keen to rotate things on a regular basis.”
Morgan has also been inviting artists to visit Dia:Beacon to get a feel for the space and Dia’s unique way of presenting exhibitions. “Coming from the Tate where the Turbine Hall is a space that so many artists dream about occupying, I’d like to see Dia become a place where artists think: ‘This is where I would like to produce this particular project, with these people, because they will offer something others won’t’,” she says.
An eye on Asia and Latin America As the Daskalopoulos curator for international art at Tate Modern, Morgan was tasked with acquiring contemporary and emerging art from non-Western regions. At Dia, Morgan is also looking to grow the collection beyond its current geographical confines, which at the moment is mainly limited to the US and Europe, predominantly Germany. “We need to pay a lot more attention to Europe, but also Latin America and Asia, where there were a lot of relevant conversations going on [during the 1960s and 1970s],” she says.
Money for acquisitions, it seems, is not an issue. While Vergne drew criticism from many in the art world for selling several major pieces from Dia’s collection at Sotheby’s in 2013 to raise cash for acquisitions, Morgan says “it is not in [her] nature” to think about deaccessioning. “There’s been extensive fundraising at Dia and there’s money specifically allocated for acquisition funds,” she says.