Dia finds new day in gigantic gallery space

Over the past few months the art world's been abuzz over a former Nabisco printing plant on the banks of the Hudson River in Beacon, N.Y. That's where the Dia Art Foundation opened a spectacular new contemporary art center 60 miles north of New York City. Inside, in galleries composed like odes to individual artists, Dia has revealed its extensive but little-known collection of late 20th-century sculpture, paintings, photography and installation art.

Shortly after its opening in May, I toured Dia:Beacon. It's an amazing place. With a whopping 240,000 square feet of gallery space — that's bigger than four football fields — under the sawtooth, skylit roof of the old industrial plant, Dia:Beacon is a miracle of natural light and huge open spaces well-geared to the challenging artworks the foundation honors.

Dia was created in the 1970s by art dealer Heiner Friedrich and his wife, Texas oil heiress Philippa de Menil, to support the work of a few groundbreaking artists whose work wouldn't fit the confines of downtown New York galleries. The foundation favored enormous earthworks projects and innovations with light and space by artists such as James Turrell, Walter De Maria, Donald Judd and Dan Flavin.

Still, Dia's tenure hasn't been all rosy. In the 1980s, the oil stock that fed Dia's generosity suddenly tanked and left it foundering in debt, unable to pay artists the money they relied on. The credit for Dia's survival goes to Charles Wright III, an innovative Seattle attorney who stepped in as director and reinvented the beleaguered private foundation.

Dia's current director, Michael Govan, visited Seattle a couple weeks ago to give a presentation with Turrell — whose new permanent Skyspace will open at the Henry Art Gallery on Saturday. It's a mark of Dia's success that the lecture not only sold out 700 seats in advance, but brought an overflow crowd of 160 for the live-feed video presentation next door. Topping it off, there were scalpers outside the Henry Gallery, hustling tickets before the event. For an art lecture?

'Radical artwork'

Over lunch at the Henry, Govan said that attendance at Dia:Beacon has already far outstripped expectations. Administrators projected 60,000 to 100,000 visitors the first year. But when Govan was in Seattle, with Beacon open for just five weeks, some 25,000 people had already been through the doors.

Why so much excitement?

"It's very radical artwork," Govan says. "They dispensed with frames and pedestals, all the trappings. What they didn't dispense with is art."

"Dia" means conduit, and the foundation was born as a way to enable exceptional art projects to be realized. The foundation spent lavish amounts on a select few artists so that they could do extraordinary things — work that might not otherwise have existed.

For example, Dia purchased the Roden Crater in Arizona for James Turrell and paid him to work on the massive earthwork project he'd envisioned. Dia funded Walter De Maria's "Lightning Field," a mile-wide outdoor installation permanently located in a remote part of New Mexico. It supported Donald Judd during the early years of his vision for a multifaceted sculpture installation on a 340-acre former military post in Marfa, Texas. Dia kept artists on a payroll to work on huge, unconventional projects and also commissioned more containable artworks, such as those now on display at Beacon: from light installations by Dan Flavin to delicate abstract paintings by Agnes Martin. Dia's mission is to help people understand an artist by showing a full spectrum of his or her work. The airy galleries at Beacon act as a series of individual museums, each honoring a single artist. Among them are pop artist Andy Warhol, German conceptualist Joseph Beuys, and sculptors Louise Bourgeois, Donald Judd and John Chamberlain.

One of the most amazing experiences is a group of "negative" sculptures by Michael Heizer (known in Seattle for his stone sculpture "Adjacent, Against, Upon" at Myrtle Edwards Park). At Dia, Heizer's "North, East, South, West" is a group of four sculptural forms that each sink below the floor, rather than rising from it. Together the four inverted steel forms create an installation that spans 125 feet and drops 20 feet beneath the floor level. Walking cautiously among the sculpted voids creates a stomach-gripping physical response, part aesthetic wonder, part vertigo.

A similar body-response happens standing next to the awesome mass of Richard Serra's "Union of the Torus and the Sphere," which fills an entire gallery like a listing cargo ship docked between piers. Or the skin-tingling presence of his four enormous "Torqued Ellipses," a series of towering mazes that you can walk among and through. "Everybody wants one 'Torqued Ellipse,' " Govan said, about the sculptor's work, displayed in major public collections around the world. But where else can you go to experience a whole series of them?

That kind of in-depth appreciation of an artist's work is what sets Dia apart.

It's also partly what got it into trouble. Dia worked behind the scenes, supporting process rather than product, spending lavishly on its chosen few. It was an unrestricted private foundation, based on individual taste, personal commitment and a single, seemingly limitless source of income.

But the money dried up. And, in the late 1980s, the whole beautiful dream began to crumble. That's where Charlie Wright came in.

Smart solutions

Dia was in a financial freefall when Wright took over as director. He said the foundation had started off with probably $40 million to $50 million of Philippa de Menil's private fortune, but, by the time Wright stepped up, it had fallen to more than $5 million in debt. "The challenge coming into Dia at that time was to find a way to save the stuff in progress and begin to develop more of a public presence so that we could attract support." That meant setting up as a nonprofit, selling off unused real estate, adding some generous supporters to the board — and also placating a handful of very unhappy artists whose monthly checks had suddenly stopped.

Turrell was among them. So was Judd, who sued the foundation. "Jim and others were left high and dry," Wright says. "We just didn't have the capital to do anything."

Dia still had art, though, and Wright set about finding smart solutions for how to show it. "We focused on ways to manage the permanent collection," he said. "There was a huge collection of Warhol, for example, so we set out in the late '80s to try and form a museum for Warhol's work." Through a partnership with the Carnegie Institute in Warhol's hometown of Pittsburgh and support from the Warhol estate, Wright was able to initiate the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, now home to much of Dia's extensive Warhol collection.

He also worked out a partnership with the Menil Collection in Houston to establish a repository for Dia's large holdings of work by Cy Twombly. And, perhaps most impressively, he proved his skill as a diplomat by winning the admiration of many of Dia's alienated artists, including Turrell. Dia no longer provides funding for Roden Crater but is involved in long-term management of the project, just as it is for De Maria's "Lightning Field."

That's Dia's commitment. "We'll exist to maintain these things, facilitate them being interpreted," says director Govan.

"One really important thing is that these works live. We're not interested in art that doesn't have longevity of purpose. Great works of art reveal themselves very slowly — very slowly over multiple visits and, I would argue, over multiple generations. They're not static. This is an essential concept for Dia."

Sheila Farr: sfarr@seattletimes.com