After the procedure continued for several days, Serra realized the task was meant to make both father and son feel better about one another—and that he would have moved that sand anywhere. This autopoietic account summarizes one of Serra’s most important contributions to the history of art: to recast sculpture as a single action carried through until completion, while probing the relation between form and action, as well as what it takes to initiate action. The last part he most explicitly addressed in film and video works (1968–79) that looked at the physiology of muscle reflex and the structures of communication systems, mass media, social justice, and labor organizing.

Much later, in 2001, Serra’s artwork was the first to enter Dia Beacon, when the former Nabisco factory building was undergoing transformation into a museum in Upstate New York. Interior partitions were built around his sculptures, and a spiraling sequence of galleries devoted to Serra was designed to offer a variety of spatial experiences.

Vast volumes bathed in natural light are the norm at Dia Beacon, but walls closely frame the eight Serras on view. Two intimately sized rooms host Scatter Piece (1967) and Elevational Wedge (2001). For the first work, Serra poured hot rubber into pliable strips that are scattered on the floor around a taut line of string suspended some eight inches off the ground. The imaginary plane that the string conjures is a reminder of the fact that there is no such thing as an action in a vacuum—that casting sculpture is always a kind of relational performance. The tension between form and action returns in Elevational Wedge, a perplexing piece for which the floor was slanted downward in relation to an inclined sheet of steel that looks like a ramp even though it remains level with the rest of the ground. Look up from there and your eye meets a window framing the top of Union of the Torus and the Sphere (2001), a sculpture in which curved plates of steel, one concave and the other convex, rest on each other while calling to mind both the bow and the sail of a ship squeezed into the architecture. Close to that is Consequence (2003), a two-part wall-size drawing that plays with mass in relation to placement.

The sequence of Serra’s works culminates five steps down, in what was once the factory’s loading station. That’s where three many-ton Torqued Ellipses (1996–97) and the equally imposing 2000 (2000) quietly unfurl in a row. Dia Art Foundation commissioned the Ellipses in the mid-1990s and first showed them in an exhibition that opened in Chelsea in 1997. The twisting structures gave Serra the opportunity to work with a new sculptural form that provokes a constantly revolving, involuting experience. They continue to astonish viewers decades later—and surely will for many decades to come. Their scale is more than can be fully comprehended, and their materiality attracts a kind of bodily engagement that is entirely their own. Whenever I walk visitors through them, the effect is invariably one of disoriented awe.  

Matilde Guidelli-Guidi is a curator, and curatorial department co-head at Dia Art Foundation.

The Sam Gilliam Award was established last year by the late artist’s foundation and his widow, Annie Gawlak, who serves as president of the foundation. With plans to dole out the prize annually for the next decade, the award will go to “an artist working anywhere in the world who has made a significant contribution in any medium and for whom the award would be transformative,” according to a release. 

This distinction in many ways is meant to honor Gilliam’s own legacy. Beginning in the 1960s, Gilliam unfurled canvases from their stretches and hung his abstractions loose, often draping them in the center of rooms. Gilliam, who died in 2022 at 88, is now considered one of most significant artists working in the latter part of the 20th century.

Gilliam’s work has had an institutional resurgence in recent years, with Dia acquiring displaying major works by Gilliam at its Beacon location from 2019 until 2022. Ultimately, the foundation jointly acquired Double Merge (1968) for its permanent collection with the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. 

In a statement, Gawlak said, “Sam’s role as an educator and advocate for other artists, especially young and emerging, was of central importance to him and a critical component of his life’s work, and we are honored to continue his legacy in championing rising artists. Dia is the ideal partner for advancing Sam’s vision.”

Mahama is best-known for his use of jute sacks that he has transformed into monumental installations, as he did at the 2015 Venice Biennale, curated by Okwui Enwezor. Mahama typically stitches together these found jute sacks and drapes them over various architectural structures, as he has done in different cities across Ghana. Mahama also works collaboratively, as his materials are sourced communally, and he uses the money earned from his artwork to support the economy and institutions in Tamale, Ghana, where he was born. 

Mahama said, in a statement, that since his mentor Kąrî’kạchä Seid’ou introduced him to Gilliam’s work, which “has been greatly influential to me ever since. The most important aspect of any community is to share their many gifts, even if they are born out of precarity, for within that point do we expand freedom to all life forms.”

He was chosen by a five-member that included Gawlak; Jordan Carter, Dia curator and co–department head; Emiliano Valdés, chief curator at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín in Colombia; Zoé Whitley, director of the Chisenhale Gallery in London; and Courtney J. Martin, the recently appointed director of the Rauschenberg Foundation and a previous chief curator and deputy director of Dia. 

The jury selected Mahama from a pool of artists “in response to his continuous growth as an artist, in terms of the complexity, scale, and responsiveness to site in his multifaceted material practice, as well the meaningful impact of his ambitious work as a community-oriented practitioner,” according to a release. 

In a statement, Dia director Jessica Morgan said, “Mahama champions collaboration in his work; just as he gives renewed purpose to the materials he collects and recycles into artworks, he revitalizes his communities by turning castoff structures into institutions for convening, learning, art-making, and collective growth. This award honors both sides of his sophisticated practice.”

Morelos was referring to Cielo terrenal (Earthly Heaven), one of two newly produced installations now on view at Dia’s Chelsea space. The piece is so dimly lit that upon entering it, you might think you’re just staring into a void. The darkened gallery is also eerily quiet. “Silence is important because in silence you can hear her,” Morelos told me, referring to the work. “She speaks very softly.”

Though the piece is soundless and largely lightless, it is not scentless. Immediately, you can smell cinnamon and cloves, both of which recur in several of Morelos’s installations, like the one that debuted at the 2022 Venice Biennale, another large-scale installation made from aromatic earth. Both spices are references to the ofrendas (offerings) that farmers in the northern Andes of Colombia make “to give thanks and to nourish Mother Earth” during the harvest season, said Morelos, who was born in the country’s north and is now based in Bogotá. As part of the ceremony, the farmers dig a hole a meter into the ground, filling it with tobacco, rum, corn, sweets, and other products. Adding cinnamon is Morelos’s way of creating her own offering to the earth.

“Here, you are entering a space where the land is sacred,” she said. “We are remembering many aspects of the earth that we have forgotten. What I’m doing, in perfuming the works, is creating a way to recall that the earth is feminine.”

On view until July, Cielo terrenal is constantly changing, depending on the time of day and the seasons. (Subtle artificial lighting helps keep the work from being totally dark when there is a lack of daylight.) As one’s eyes adjust to the piece, a thick impasto formed from black soil, water, cinnamon, and cloves can be just barely seen covering the floors and walls. Discarded materials from past Dia installations also come into focus: wood from a Dan Graham piece, felt from a Robert Morris work, floor planks, sections of false walls. “Art can be created with these things that were almost garbage, so it’s art that is expressing itself from what it was,” Morelos said. “These objects still have the spirit of Dia, and now they have been reactivated.”

In creating these installations, Morelos was especially attuned to the history of Dia, long considered a beacon for the history of Minimalism and Land art. Its collection includes permanent installations like Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty in Utah and Walter De Maria’s The New York Earth Room in SoHo, and it has helped create a canon of these movements that remains dominated by white men. Over the past decade, Dia has made significant strides in aiming to rewrite that history.

For her part, Morelos sees her Dia installations as a sharp contrast—if not a complete rebuttal—to Dia’s history and the artists whose work it has supported. “It is a feminine sculpture with feminine energy,” she said. “I am a minimalist. In minimalism, there is a silence that I like. There is an atmosphere of silence and nothing else. Not everything is told to you. You can go into an exhibition and search for what you think—you’re free to interpret what it is, if it’s ruins, an excavation, a flood. All of that is there.”

Cielo terrenal is bathed in black, and Morelos imagined it as what it would be like to experience entering Kazimir Malevich’s 1915 painting Black Square, which Dia curator Alexis Lowry has called “the origin of the monochrome” in Western modernism. The soil that lends the piece its blackness comes from Goshen, a town in the Hudson Valley about a half-hour away from Beacon, where Dia has an even bigger space. It has been sprinkled over several of the recycled objects and also used to form mounds and pyramid-like sculptures, giving the piece the look of an archaeological site. “Look at it like the ruins of Minimalism,” Morelos said, beginning to laugh. “If you came a thousand years from now and went to Dia Beacon, this is what you would find.”

Morelos has worked with soil in a range of colors—brown, ochre, yellow, orange, blue, green, gray, and red—but her pivot to black came after the death of her father. “This work is called Cielo terrenal because we say, ‘We go to heaven when we die,’ but no, we don’t go,” she said. “Do you understand the difference? We don’t go up there. We go down here to the cielo terrestre [terrestrial sky]. This is our heaven. This is where we transform into other forms of life.”

The painted soil in Cielo terrenal stops about four feet high, rising to the same exact level that water did when it filled the gallery during Hurricane Sandy in 2012. As Morelos was sourcing materials for the installation, she connected that deluge to the Colombian Amazon, which frequently floods, often to dangerous levels. Noting her times spent swimming and canoeing in that river, which is filled with boas, she said, “That energy of the jungle is here.”

Delicately placed throughout the installation are ceramics she made with the Indigenous Yucuna people using a similarly dark earth that comes from Colombia’s Amazonian region. “I wanted to bring objects made with soil from Colombia, but it is not possible to transport raw soil from one country to another,” Morelos said. “So, it occurred to me to make ceramics because it is cooked soil—that could make the journey.”

Several of the ceramics resemble forms that can be interpreted as either seeds or bullets. The ambiguity is intentional—just as a bullet can puncture the skin, a seed must pierce the earth in order germinate. In this way, Morelos sees this installation as entering an underground space. “New life always happens underground,” she said. “For me, the black earth is the most fertile earth. I am talking about fertility, about life, about gestation. These seeds are going to become plants, trees. These pieces that were about to be discarded are expressing their materiality here once again.”

These bullet-like seeds can also be read through the lens of recent Colombian history, which has been marked by decades of murders and the disappearances of thousands. “People are killed and buried, and we don’t know where,” Morelos said. “I understood that if you eat, for example, a papaya, that papaya could have been fed from a corpse that was buried underneath. Life manifests itself in other ways. In other words, the dead corpse is feeding a new life.”

If Cielo terrenal is subtle and still, El abrazo (The Embrace), the second installation at Dia, is its opposite: towering and powerful. A monumental structure made of a lighter shade of soil that floats almost a foot off the ground, the piece towers so high that it nearly pushes against the building’s vaulted wood-beam ceiling. Toward the work’s rear is an alcove that can be entered. It narrows as you go deeper, reflecting a literal embrace from the earth. “When I go to the forest, to the mountain, I feel that nature embraces me. I am nature,” she said.

This soil is recycled from the grounds of Dia Beacon and is dotted with hay that glows in the warm late morning light. Morelos and her team carefully embedded each strand of hay into the work’s surface. “Each one found its place,” she said. “I’ve always said that all the dirt in one of my works has to pass through my hands—I have to touch it.”

Morelos wants visitors to touch the work, too. A brochure for the exhibition includes a poem by Morelos that gives instructions on how to do so. Titled “Instructions to touch the earth,” it reads, in part: “Let the hands listen, see the smell of the earth / with the fingertips, let its taste be savored / by the skin.”

In adding the hay to El abrazo, Morelos said she “came to understand the work itself a lot. I understood that, here, something very big was done from the very small. Here, there is nothing big. Everything is united and woven like a basket.” She connected this to the teachings she had received from Isaías Román, an Indigenous knowledge keeper of the Uitoto people who taught Morelos his people’s cosmology. “According to their cosmology,” she said, “the universe is a basket, where everything is united, nothing is separated. The air you breathe in is the air that moves the hay in front of you. You are woven into the cosmos even if you don’t know it.”

Morelos’s decision to make the work appear to float came from a desire “to put the earth in a sacred place, in a positive space,” she said. “Normally, if you have dirt in your house or in your office, you are going to vacuum it.” This, on the other hand, is a huge mound of soil that can’t be swept away. But the move to exhibit it this way also grew out of her installation at the 2022 Venice Biennale, where Morelos found that visitors interacted with her art in ways she did not expect and that she wanted to understand through the making of El abrazo.

Her sculpture at the Biennale, a maze-like arrangement of dirt called Earthly Paradise (2022), was among the show’s more celebrated works. But during the exhibition’s preview days, she and the Biennale’s security guards witnessed people kicking the work and tearing pieces from it. She was shocked by this behavior—especially from art world professionals, who she said should know “how to behave in an exhibition.” (A Venice Biennale spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.)

After thinking on why people may react in this way, she realized that “people are used to stepping on the earth—to mistreating it, to mining it, to extracting oil in a bad way. I wanted to elevate it to a more sacred space, as if the earth were rising, floating, as if she had the power to rise. I also want people to feel challenged by how this was made: how did you make this magic?”

The artists Dia has historically supported have also tended to challenge viewers in vastly different ways. In works being shown in Beacon, Michael Heizer uses boulders that are so large, they feel as though they may crush you. Richard Serra has produced earth-colored spirals of steel that can be walked into, just as you can walk into El abrazo. But Serra’s feel claustrophobic when you enter them, and Morelos is after something softer.

“This piece is large, but it is ephemeral,” she said. “There could be earthquakes, floods, and nothing is going to happen to a Richard Serra work. This is made of earth—it’s so fragile. It has size and magnitude, but it also has a humility in the materials and a fragility. There’s something very feminine, very delicate. The embrace happens literally when you get closer and feel the earth surround you.”

When asked why she wanted to make El abrazo so big, Morelos answered wryly, “You could ask the same of Richard Serra or Michael Heizer. But think about my height. Short people often aren’t listened to. In the traditions in the Amazon or the Andes, we don’t hear them. They have to be very big for them to hear it.” She added, “I am creating an experience, an experience as if you are seeing the landscape. For me, it’s like making a sculpture of a mother goddess. A sculpture like this could have been done millions of years ago.”

In its most basic form, the work, Depreciation (2018), constitutes an acre of land on Edisto Island, South Carolina, that is now being placed on extended loan to the Dia Art Foundation, which is known for its deep holdings of Minimalist and Conceptualist art. But like many other Rowland pieces, this one unfolds a complex history dealing with structural racism, land ownership, and power.

Edisto Island is one of the many South Carolina landmasses that were set aside for freed enslaved people on January 16, 1865 as part of a policy more familiarly known as “40 acres and a mule.” Contemporary historians have regarded the policy as an effort to stave off the possibility of a revolt by the formerly enslaved.

Some 10,000 subsequently people settled on Edisto Island, but their situation did not last long. In 1866, after Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, Andrew Johnson revoked the policy more formally known as Field Order 15, leaving the door open for Confederate owners to repossess their land, including the site of the Maxcy Plantation, which occupied Rowland’s one-acre spot and some of the surrounding area.

Rowland’s piece of land, 8060 Maxie Road, was purchased by a similarly titled nonprofit. It has now been placed under a restrictive covenant, which allows for the control of how the land is used. According to their description for the work, 8060 Maxie Road is now valued at $0, and the public cannot visit it.

The project is in keeping with past works by Rowland, who is currently the subject of a show at the MMK Frankfurt in Germany. For one particularly memorable show at New York’s Artists Space in 2016, for example, they sourced furniture produced by Corcraft, a company that relies upon the labor of inmates to produce its goods, and re-presented them at Artists Space, along with related documentation.

Often, Rowland’s work is not available for acquisition by institutions, bucking the traditional mode by which art enters museum collections. Instead, they make their pieces available on loan, typically with stipulations that are disclosed to the general public. Depreciation is listed as being on “extended loan” to the Dia Art Foundation.

Though the land itself is not viewable, Dia promised to exhibit framed documents related to Depreciation at its Chelsea gallery.

“Dia’s stewardship of Depreciation continues our founding mission of forging sustained collaborations with artists to ensure the legacy of their work that, physically or conceptually, is often beyond the scope and scale of the conventional museum or gallery model,” director Jessica Morgan said in a statement. “While many of the other works that make up our constellation of locations and sites engage the physical encounter between the viewer, the work, and their surroundings, Depreciation instead probes the idea of site in an entirely different manner.”

For many years, Dia’s galleries have been filled predominantly by works by white men—the Richard Serras and Michael Heizers of the world. Morgan has stated that one of her goals is to change that, a project of which the loan of Depreciation appears to be a part.

Rowland will have a 2024 solo show with new work at Dia:Beacon. It will be organized by Dia curator Jordan Carter, who said in a statement with Matilde Guidelli-Guidi that Depreciation “critically shifts Land art’s terms of engagement and proposes new urgencies, stakes, and possibilities within the institution and the field.”

The National Labor Relations Board tallied up the ballots of union-eligible staff members and found the vote passed with 90% in favor. Eligible staff includes archivists, managers, gallery attendants, curators and many more positions.

“We are officially the Dia Union!” the Dia Union Instagram account posted Tuesday. “Thank you to our union-eligible colleagues, the wave of organizing in arts institutions, and everyone who supported our efforts. We are looking forward to sitting down with Dia leadership to start bargaining.”

More than a hundred staff members are now represented by the Local 2110 UAW across Dia’s many locations, which includes their large museum in Beacon, in New York’s Dutchess county, as well as galleries in Manhattan and Bridgehampton, with outposts in New Mexico and Germany.

Dia staff organized for a union around certain key issues, including low wages.

“Dia’s development in Beacon has actually driven up the cost of housing here. Most of us can’t afford to live in the area, not on Dia wages,” said Joel Olzak, a gallery attendant at the Beacon space, said in a past statement.

Gallery attendants make, at maximum, $16 dollars an hour, which is well below a living wage for a single-person living in Dutchess county. According to the MIT living wage calculator, a living wage for a single person in Dutchess county is $20.18, or at least $39.27 if one has a child.

At the Met and Dia, Hawkins helped steer the course on projects that involved the ultra-wealthy and the socially elite. His legal practice allowed him entrée into the upper echelons of New York society, and he was able to use those connections for projects in the museum world.

By the time Hawkins stepped down as the Met’s executive vice president in 2001, he had been on the museum’s board for more than 30 years, with 19 of them served in that position. Upon his departure, Phillip de Montebello, then the museum’s director, said, “Ashton Hawkins is himself an institution, within an institution he has loved and served with brilliance.”

Hawkins arrived in the Met during a period when its administration was determined to help launch a stagnating museum into the future. During the ’70s, he aided in the creation of the wing that now houses the Temple of Dendur, a process that involved courting the Sackler family for funding that in recent years has sparked protests.

Born in 1937, Hawkins first came to the Met in 1968 as assistant secretary to the board of trustees. The following year, he became secretary of the board and counsel of the museum.

During the span that Hawkins was at the Met, he also got involved with Dia, where he was on the board from 1985 to 1996. When Hawkins was first brought on by Dominique de Menil herself, the art center, which had become a go-to for its important offerings of Minimalist and Conceptual art, was running short on money. In a 1996 Vanity Fair profile of the Dia board, Hawkins recalled that the space’s “finances were in total chaos.”

While Hawkins succeeded in turning Dia around, his tenure there ended in 1996 after an internal war that pitted him and other board members against newer trustees who dangled the possibility of withholding sizable donations. Hawkins and those board members resigned amid a controversial coup.

When it came to Hawkins’s law practice, he helped define certain legal codes that are now used somewhat widely within the art world. During the ’60s, he was among those who drafted a treaty adopted by UNESCO that governs the transportation of artworks across national borders. He also advised the Association of Art Museum Directors and the American Alliance of Museums, two industry groups that offer recommendations to art institutions and the people who run them.

Upon Hawkins’s departure from the Met, Katharine Lee Reid, then the director of the Cleveland Art Museum and president of the AAMD, said, “He has been most generous in sharing his talents and has had an overview and insight into the art issues of our time that have been a great help to many people.”

In a statement, Dia director Jessica Morgan said, “As we look to tell a more comprehensive and inclusive narrative of the period of art history Dia has historically been focused on—the 1960s and ’70s—as well as extending this thread through our contemporary commissioning program, publications, and public engagement, Moro’s expertise will be vital. In this newly created role, Moro will be a thought leader, overseeing all programmatic aspects of the institution. His voice will be crucial in guiding Dia’s uniquely artist-centric, experimental ethos.”

As it approaches its 50th anniversary in 2024, Dia has worked in recent years to expand its purview within and beyond the Minimalism and Land art movements with which it has been most closely associated since its founding. Numerous exhibitions at Dia:Beacon in upstate New York have included surveys of work by women as well as artists of color. And programming of different kinds there and at Dia’s core location in New York City’s Chelsea gallery district have engaged contemporary artists, writers, and thinkers working in different disciplines.

At Museo Tamayo, Moro’s credits include work on “OTRXS MUNDXS,” a survey of artists working in Mexico City, and the museum’s 40th anniversary survey “Beyond the Trees” opening next week. At SCAD, he worked on shows focused on Elizabeth Catlett and Frederick Douglass as well as female Latin American artists and others including Isaac Julien and Katharina Grosse. He also worked as a curator for a time at the Park Avenue Armory.

In a statement, Moro, who will begin his new role early next year, said, “I am delighted to join Dia, a trailblazing institution which has led the conversation on notions of site specificity, temporality, scale, preservation, and the artist-centric model, all of which are critical as we rethink today’s cultural institutions. It is inspiring to see how Dia has been actively reshaping its mission and values, and as I think about our collective future, I am excited to help propel the foundation’s exhibitions, publications, and public programs to be even more accessible, diverse, and meaningful to all the different communities we serve.”

The past year has been difficult for museums, many of them facing financial hardship even before the pandemic brought monthslong closures and layoffs. A survey published by the American Alliance of Museums in June estimated that it will take “years” for United States art institutions to recover from the fallout of the global health crisis; it also revealed that 56 percent of museums issued furloughs or layoffs since March 2020.

At the same time, museums are feeling an urgent need to diversify their holdings to make them better reflect the full scope of art history, by acquiring works by women artists and artists of color. Many of those same artists, however, like Gilliam, have become the subject of heated competition between private collectors eager to buy. “It is becoming somewhat unfeasible for a lot of institutions to acquire major works, as prices are reaching levels that only certain private collectors are able to respond to,” said Morgan. Some institutions have turned to deaccessioning, like the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which sold a Mark Rothko in 2019 in order to buy pieces by Mickalene Thomas, Frank Bowling, Leonora Carrington, and others. If museums can get over some logistical issues, joint acquisitions may be one way for them to add new works to their collections, even as they stay within straitened budgets.

In 2003 the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; Tate, London; and the Centre Pompidou in Paris jointly acquired Bill Viola’s 2001 three-channel video installation Five Angels for the Millennium.

“I think co-ownership is great,” MFAH director Gary Tinterow said. “There’s a whole lot of art to go around. We are all suffering from insufficient storage and we are all finding our display spaces continually under pressure.” Art institutions must “provide for the public the richest, the best, the most diverse, the most exciting visual experience,” he said. “That’s our job. And one way to do that is to own works of art. Another way to do it is to borrow works of art. Another way to do it is [to] jointly own works of art.” Double Merge, he said, “is one of the most notable among the [museum’s] efforts” to acquire more works by Black artists.

“It seems like a great way forward for all our institutions,” Morgan said. “At the heart of it is the benefit of being able to see the work, and I think we’re all distressed when we think about all the works that are never put on view for one reason or another. This seems like, in many ways, a forward-thinking move and it definitely feels like the future of collection building.”

Another important Sam Gilliam painting, Arc II, from 1970, which the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston acquired on its own, in addition to Double Merge.

While the roots for joint acquisitions go back as far as the early 20th-century practice of partage, which established a precedent for shared ownership of finds from archaeological research, the practice as applied to modern and contemporary art is more recent, and in the 21st century it has even extended to international collaborations. The earliest such instance was the 2003 shared acquisition of Bill Viola’s 2001 video installation Five Angels for the Millennium by the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; Tate, London; and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, initiated by Maxwell Anderson, then director of the Whitney. The benefits were twofold: the European museums, which did not have the same private sector support as American art institutions, could more easily acquire the artwork as part of a group; all three institutions were helped by sharing the costs associated with the care and storage of such a large-scale installation.

“That was a watershed for New York museums because it presaged an opportunity—particularly for works that are highly complex or large-scale or require a lot of time and attention to install—to have shared ownership,” Anderson said of the three-way acquisition. “I was looking at it as a model going forward for room-size installations that otherwise might not make it into museum collections.”

While it may, on the surface, seem complicated, “shared ownership,” Anderson said, “is no more onerous than all the other types of quietly signed and grudgingly agreed-to agreements that pepper art museums across the country. Keeping track of those is a full-time job for the registration department.” Still, since the Viola, he said, “we’ve seen some efforts to do this, but it hasn’t taken off. I think a lot of that is a function of the territoriality that is natural to the art world.” As Tinterow sees it, “the fundamental obstacle for some institutions is control,” and, given that no participant in a joint acquisition has the unilateral power to sell or display a work at will, relinquishing unrestricted ownership can turn museums off. (At the time of the Viola acquisition, Kathy Halbreich, then director of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, told the New York Times, “these days none of us can afford to go it alone,” adding, “we just have to park our egos outside the door.”)

“The whole premise of permanent collections is under scrutiny these days.’’

Other deterrents to such agreements between institutions are often of a practical nature. As any insurance company will tell you, the more times you transport a complex work like Gilliam’s Double Merge—or, really, any piece that isn’t digital—you incur risk. There are also issues related to conservation, storage, loan applications, and legal intricacies to work out between participating institutions. Paul Martineau, associate curator in the photography department at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, which entered into a joint acquisition with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2011 to add more than 2,000 works by Robert Mapplethorpe to its collection, said that joint acquisitions make sense for institutions looking to buy a work that is “just completely out of reach, but otherwise it can be logistically difficult,” he said. “And sometimes that weighs against a collaboration.”

Writer and adviser to cultural institutions András Szántó attributes the relative infrequency of joint acquisitions in part to the fact that museums are not set up to co-own works. Szántó said that there are “huge advantages” to the practice, given that most institutions have “severe limitations not just in their budgets but also in their ability to display and store and care for works.”

“There are very well-established mechanisms for loaning works and touring exhibitions, but this practice [of jointly acquiring works] is still rather new, and museums are not that accustomed to experimenting with new ways,” he said. “For museums, anything that doesn’t fit neatly into the existing mechanisms or categories is going to be a challenge. I think collaboration in general falls into an area that everybody would agree is a good idea, but when it comes to the nuts and bolts it’s complicated to do—so that creates a disincentive to do it.”

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art jointly acquired William Kentridge’s multimedia installation The Refusal of Time (2012), above, in 2013.

Despite drawbacks that may be keeping the practice from becoming a norm for museums, the last decade has seen joint acquisitions of various kinds of works. In 2013 the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art jointly acquired William Kentridge’s multimedia installation The Refusal of Time (2012), and in 2016 SFMOMA and the Dallas Museum of Art joined forces to purchase Walter De Maria’s 1986 sculpture Large Rod Series: Circle/Rectangle, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13.

And such acquisitions have not been limited to artworks. In 2020 the Harvard Art Museums in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico, together acquired a group of 20 pigments—including shades of burnt sienna and indigo—that O’Keeffe used. The institutions bought the pigments at Sotheby’s New York last spring for around $56,000, and Narayan Khandekar, director of the Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies and senior conservation scientist at the Harvard Art Museums, said they will help art professionals better understand how O’Keeffe worked.

Georgia O’Keeffe used a wooden crate to store her pigments, which have been jointly acquired by the O’Keeffe Museum and Harvard. Shown here, a selection from the Forbes Pigment Collection at Harvard.

The pigments will be part of a collaborative research effort between the two museums, which will use small samples of the materials for scientific study. Khandekar likened the agreement with the O’Keeffe Museum to “shared custody,” and the steward of the pigments will depend on which institution has them at what time.

Other agreements are more time specific. Double Merge, for instance, will move between the Dia and MFAH every five years. The museum in possession of the work insures it, and decides when to exhibit it and for how long. But getting any further into the weeds, time-wise, doesn’t seem worth, it, Khandekar said. “I think in many ways if you have to get down to the nuts and bolts of the number of days and hours, then it’s not so much a collaboration as a legal agreement.” With the pigments, he said, Harvard and the O’Keeffe Museum are striving to cultivate a “nice, generous approach to having joint ownership.”

“What’s interesting to me,” he continued, “is the amount of attention that came from buying jars of pigment. The fact that people are interested in that is good news to us. It tells us that we’re doing something that’s interesting to the public.”

It remains an open question whether joint acquisitions will catch on more widely in the art world as museums start to navigate the post-Covid landscape. Phenomena like the recent NFT craze and the rise in popularity of immersive experiences like Yayoi Kusama’s “Infinity Mirror Room” installations and van Gogh digital projections may change the way museums think about investing in and building permanent collections of objects, Anderson said.

“I think the whole premise of permanent collections is under scrutiny these days in that the public seems to be responding as much to temporary experiences and events,” he said. “These are things that seem to be driving attention. There is a bit of questioning about the degree to which permanent collection growth is still the mark of institutional heft and value.”

In 2016, SFMOMA and the Dallas Museum of Art teamed up to buy Walter De Maria’s 1986 sculpture Large Rod Series Circle/Rectangle 5, 7, 9, 11, 13.

Szántó pointed out that the art world is home to a “systemic desire to collaborate, but there’s very little actual evidence of it,” even in the aftermath of a once-in-a-century global crisis.

“I think it’s early days, but it will be interesting to see, as new financial technologies begin to infiltrate the art world and the museum world, whether they create new platforms or frameworks to facilitate this kind of sharing of the burdens of ownership between museums and also potentially other partners,” Szántó concluded.

In the meantime, there is another benefit to the joint acquisition: more people, in different regions, will get to see the work. “This is an incredibly important work,” said Morgan of the Gilliam piece. “And it would be better for it to be shown in multiple locations rather than just one.”

A version of this article appears in the August/September 2021 issue of ARTnews, under the title “Share and Share Alike.”

Over the past two decades, the Dia Art Foundation has made a push to diversify its holdings, which have long skewed white and male. It wasn’t until 2002 that Dia, first founded in 1974, acquired pieces by Agnes Martin, making them the first works in its collection by a woman. And it wasn’t until the 2010s that the foundation began adding works by Sam Gilliam and Charles Gaines, the first Black artists to enter Dia’s collection.

But slowly, Dia:Beacon, the foundation’s grand museum in Upstate New York, has showcased with increasing regularity art by under-recognized figures like Kishio Suga, Gilliam, and Dorothea Rockburne alongside room-size installations by well-known artists like Michael Heizer, Walter De Maria, and Robert Morris. In an interview, Carter said he is interested in “expanding the canon and telling the untold stories of the period. It’s work that Dia has really committed to.”

A specialist in Fluxus and Conceptual art, Carter has been at the Art Institute of Chicago since 2017, when he joined as an assistant curator. Since then, his focus has often been work by Black artists, with solo shows devoted to Ellen Gallagher, Benjamin Patterson, and Richard Hunt. A forthcoming exhibition curated by Carter at the museum will spotlight the work of stanley brouwn, an under-recognized Conceptualist whose work often enlisted unconventional forms of measurement.

[Jordan Carter on the Future of the Museum]

Prior to the Art Institute of Chicago, Carter had been a curatorial fellow at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. He has also held positions at the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

“Jordan Carter brings with him broad expertise in the period of art history that sits at the core of Dia’s collection,” said Jessica Morgan, Dia’s director, in a statement. “His curatorial interests also offer a vital expansion of this period and its enduring influence on contemporary art, that will be key to Dia’s programming in the coming years.”

Carter said that he aims to continue developing our understanding of that era of art history. “The ’60s and ’70s are in no way an exhausted period,” he noted, adding, “It’s really about championing, expanding, and questioning, and that questioning is really at the core of Dia’s values and really at the core of Conceptual art in general.”

Correction, 9/24/21, 12:40 p.m.: A previous version of this article stated that works by Jack Whitten had been acquired by Dia. A Dia spokesperson said that an exhibition of Whitten’s art was forthcoming, but that the foundation has no immediate plans to acquire his work.

“It took five years for us to come up with something that would be not only worthy of Dia but also something that could really be a piece of me,” Craig told ARTnews of the project. The process began when curators at the Dia Art Foundation—an enterprise most often associated with sculptors like Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, and Walter De Maria—started thinking years ago of ways to mark the anniversary of the first Dream Festival, an early Dia production in 1975 that featured a program of music organized by composer La Monte Young and artist Marian Zazeela.

“We were thinking about the impact of Dia’s involvement with sound and what the next generation of that would be,” said Dia curator Kelly Kivland, who noted the foundation’s history with Young as well as sound artist Max Neuhaus, the creator of an installation that has been humming mysteriously for decades beneath a sidewalk grate in New York’s Times Square. “That led us to electronic music, and we really homed in on techno because of its attributes [owing to] Minimalist and Post-Minimalist sound and its effects today. Also there is the architectural element of potentialities in post-industrial spaces and different forms of experimentation.”

Craig—part of a fabled lineage for a legacy of techno music that was born and bred in Detroit—said he drew connections between his hometown and Dia:Beacon’s setting in a former factory that had been abandoned for years before it was transformed in an art-world destination in 2003. “I’m representing not only myself but also my background coming from the hood in the D,” Craig said. “The kind of space we’re working with at Dia, there are tons of abandoned spaces I’ve been working with my whole lifetime. The fall of the automotive industry in Detroit left all these factories that turned into party spaces—and a lot of them are still there.”

Of Beacon’s remote setting in the Hudson River Valley, Craig said, “It’s a different landscape for me and for anyone doing anything within DJ culture. But this isn’t a DJ culture show—though when people think of Carl Craig, they’re not thinking of a badminton champion.”

Carl Craig at Dia:Beacon in February 2019.

The sound for the installation has been composed via a mix of hardware and software—modular and analogue synthesizers plus studio programs and “stray frequencies made with oscillators,” Craig said. And though some of it will be rhythmic and made in mind of the dance floor, much of it will evoke the “afterparty” part of the title. “My experience of being on the road is that no matter how many people are in a room, you can still feel this loneliness,” said the artist, who has been traveling the planet and sometimes playing multiple gigs a night for many years. Some of the sound will signal the comedown mood that can follow a spell of clubbing revelry as well as the effects of the tinnitus he developed on the job. And all of it will commune with “a space so vast that controlling the room is virtually impossible. It’s about using what is untamable to my advantage.”

“There are some acoustic obstacles, let’s say, and things that need to be taken into consideration,” Kivland said of a concrete room with seven seconds of reverb. But the music was made for the space it will be in, and subtle visual elements will accentuate the experience too. “There is a lighting component that involves the windows, and there is an element that will allow for a dimensionless aspect of the space,” Kivland said.

Dia will release a record as part of the project, and programming during its six-month run into September will also include live performances as well as considerations of techno’s artistic and cultural significance. Otherwise, the sound will be the star.

“The music will be a sequence,” Craig said, “that changes and morphs as time goes on.”