Dia Art Foundation’s 2020 exhibition highlights across its multiple sites and locations include the 50th anniversary of Robert Smithson’s iconic Spiral Jetty (1970), four exhibitions and commissions at Dia Beacon by Carl Craig, Joan Jonas, Mario Merz, and Keith Sonnier, a presentation at Dia Bridgehampton of new work by Jill Magid, and the release of a new Artist Web Project by Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme.
Please see below for details about Jonas’s and Magid’s upcoming exhibitions:
Dia Beacon
3 Beekman Street, Beacon, New York
Joan Jonas
Opening November 6, 2020
This exhibition features three works from Dia’s collection by Joan Jonas. The presentation in the lower-level galleries at Dia Beacon unites Jonas’s large-scale multimedia installation The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things (2004), which was commissioned as a performance for Dia in 2005–06, with two recently acquired early works, Stage Sets and After Mirage (Cones/May Windows) (both 1976).
This exhibition brings together three collection works by Joan Jonas, a founding figure of video and performance art of the 1960s and 1970s. Presented in Dia Beacon’s lower-level galleries, the exhibition features the large-scale multimedia installation The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things (2004), which was commissioned as a performance for Dia Art Foundation in 2005–06, and two recently acquired works, Stage Sets and After Mirage (Cones/May Windows) (both 1976). Collectively, the three works present a compelling trajectory of Jonas’s oeuvre from the pivotal year of 1976, when Jonas decisively turned to translating nonlinear performance and video into performance installations, to the evolution of the artist’s work thirty years later.
ACT Professor Emerita Joan Jonas is a pioneer of video and performance art, and an acclaimed multimedia artist whose work typically encompasses video, performance, installation, sound, text, and drawing. Trained in art history and sculpture, Jonas was a central figure in the performance art movement of the late 1960s, and her experiments and productions in the late 1960s and early 1970s continue to be crucial to the development of many contemporary art genres, from performance and video to conceptual art and theater. Since 1968, her practice has explored ways of seeing, the rhythms of ritual, and the authority of objects and gestures.
A New York native, Jonas continues to live and work in New York City. She received a B.A. in Art History from Mount Holyoke College in 1958, studied sculpture at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and received an M.F.A. in Sculpture from Columbia University in 1965.
After studying art history and sculpture, Jonas was a central figure in the performance art movement of the late 1960s and built relationships with many artists in her native New York. By participating in workshops by Trisha Brown and Lucinda Childs, who later became mythic figures in postmodern dance, Jonas was inspired to create her own original works based on the body. Since 1968, her practice has explored ways of seeing, the rhythms of ritual, and the authority of objects and gestures. From the 1970s onward, her works have featured a nonlinear structure without stories. Her remarkable long-term achievements also include her contributions in handing down the greatest legacy of 1960s avant-garde art represented by John Cage to future generations by developing it into a framework of postmodern art based on additive, diverse values.
Jonas is the recipient of a 2018 Kyoto Prize. The Kyoto Prize is Japan’s highest private award for global achievement, and is awarded annually in three categories — Advanced Technology, Basic Sciences, and Arts and Philosophy — and honors individuals who have contributed significantly to the scientific, technological, and cultural betterment of humankind. Jonas is this year’s recipient in the Arts and Philosophy category for her lifetime of accomplishment and global influence as an artist. Also in 2018, she had a Career Survey at the Tate Modern.
Dia Bridgehampton
23 Corwith Avenue, Bridgehampton, New York
Jill Magid
Opening June 27, 2020–May 30, 2021
A yearlong exhibition of new work by Conceptual artist Jill Magid opens in June at Dia Bridgehampton.
Magid’s work uses strategies of intimacy to subtly undermine anonymous institutions that surveil, control, or otherwise regulate our daily lives. For her exhibition at Dia Bridgehampton, Magid presents eleven screenprints from the series Homage CMYK (2019), a continuation of her multimedia project on the Mexican architect Luis Barragán. Installed in the Dan Flavin–designed exhibition space, the shimmering surfaces of Homage CMYK interrogate questions of authorship, influence, and how an object changes in relation to its context over time.
Unlicensed copies of Josef Albers’s iconic series Homage to the Square (1950–75) hang in the library and living room of Barragán’s home, Casa Barragán, which was built in Mexico City in 1948. Published reproductions of Barragán’s Homages magnify the changing effects of natural and artificial light on the surfaces of the counterfeits. To make Homage CMYK, Magid has scanned the reproductions, manipulated the skewed works back into their intended square format, and printed them again to their original size—now embedded with the delay of reproduction processes.
Color is the most relative medium in art, Albers famously observed. Our perception of local color changes according to environmental light conditions and is affected by the afterimage of its neighboring color. The experimental study of color relationships fueled the permutations of Albers’s Homage to the Square series—a defining influence on Flavin, Donald Judd, Robert Irwin, and many other artists in Dia’s collection.
Jill Magid (SMVisS ’00) is an artist, writer and filmmaker. Her first full length film, The Proposal, was released in 2019. The Proposal is part of a larger project that Jill began in 2013 – The Barragán Archives. The Barragán Archives is an extended, multimedia project examining of the legacy of Mexican architect and Pritzker Prize-winner Luis Barragán (1902–1988). Magid considers both Barragán’s professional and personal archives, and how the intersections of his official and private selves reveal divergent and aligned interests, as well as those of the institutions that have become the archives’ guardians
Solo exhibitions include Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City; San Francisco Art Institute; Tate Modern, London; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Berkeley Museum of Art, California; Tate Liverpool; and the Security and Intelligence Agency of the Netherlands. She has participated in Manifesta, the Liverpool, Bucharest, Singapore, Incheon, Gothenburg, Oslo and Performa Biennials. Magid is the recipient of the 2017 Calder Prize.
