In another installment of Dia's monthly Gallery Talks, George Trakas will be speaking about his work at Beacon Point on Saturday, May 31 at 1pm. The talk will take place on site. To make reservations, call 845-440-0100 ext 44.
Also this weekend, from Friday to Sunday, Dia:Beacon will be hosting screenings of three James Benning works. Here's a NYTimes review of the most recent Merce Cunningham performance at Dia on May 18th.
A recent blurb about Dia on Artnet.com portrays Lynne Cooke as the Robert Mugabi of Dia's curatorial fiefdom.
On another note, the first line of the blurb says that "The Dia Art Foundation is happily ensconced up on the Hudson at Dia: Beacon..." But apparantly not everyone is so pleased about moving on up. In a letter to the editor in the March 8, 2008 issue of the NY Times, former Dia Foundation trustees, Lois de Menil, Margaret Douglas-Hamilton, Peter Wolff add some back story to the Times' article on the departure of Jeffry Weiss as Director of the foundation. I had to laugh at the letter's characterization of the Riggio Galleries as a "beautifully renovated though somewhat inaccessible building in Beacon, N.Y." This is very ironic given the remote projects that Dia Foundation has supported in the past 30 years which have come to define the term "inaccessible." And, really, getting to Beacon from NYC may take a bit longer and require looking at a Metro North timetable, but it's no more taxing to get there than to get to Chelsea from one of the Burroughs. But then I usually don't enlist a car service when I do my gallery tour.
The statement clearly indicates which audience rightfully should be served by the mission of the Dia Foundation, at least according to a few of the folks who helped shape the organization; the righteous benefactors sending forth missionaries into the cultural wasteland to bring back trinkets and oddities, tales of maverick actions to festoon their parlor for to share with the fellows of their privileged class.
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