The Dia Art Foundation has finally chosen a new director. He’s Jeffrey Weiss, head of the department of modern and contemporary art at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. The appointment comes not a moment too soon. The Dia, which operates the immense Dia:Beacon museum on the Hudson River north of New York City and superintends site specific works like Walter De Maria’s “Lightning Field” in New Mexico, has been rudderless for a year, since its previous director, Michael Govan, decamped for LA to run the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
In that time the Dia seemed to lose its way for a while. It closed both of its pioneering Manhattan exhibition spaces and backed off on an announced plan to open a new space in the city’s booming meat packing district, at the base of the forthcoming High Line elevated park. When Dia bailed, the Whitney Museum jumped at the chance to take the same site for its planned new satellite facility. To make matters worse, Leonard Riggio, the Barnes & Noble CEO who was Dia’s chairman — the kind of guy who could write checks to cover Dia’s budget shortfalls if the need arose — stepped down as chairman last May and left the foundation altogether in October.
Now Nathalie de Gunzburg, the new Dia board chairwoman, says that finding a new home for Dia in New York will be the foundation’s first priority. Good idea, assuming they can afford it. The New York that Dia will eventually return to will be one with a lot more new spaces for modern and contemporary art, including that new Whitney offshoot, the upcoming New Museum of Contemporary Art in the Bowery and yet another addition being built to the Museum of Modern Art. But the Dia is a unique institution, dedicated to collecting in depth a short list of favored artists, including some, like Michael Heizer and De Maria, whose earthworks and installations would probably never have happened without Dia’s support. Though the foundation collects deeply in Warhol and John Chamberlain, its taste runs more often to the austere, cerebral and minimalist and it has thrown its weight behind that kind of art in ways no one else can afford to do. It also does a type of exhibit nobody else attempts, allowing works to remain on view for a year or more. Whatever the merits of establishing a footprint on the leafy banks of the Hudson, Dia needs to be back in Manhattan.
At the same time it needs to be doing more to promote Dia:Beacon. Attendance there has been running about 75,000 annually, somewhat below the 100,000 that Dia officials were projecting to me when I stopped by just before it opened four years ago. Weiss says he’s not ready yet to talk about specific ideas for Dia, but that he has quite a few. When he’s ready to air them, we’re all ears.