Event Details
Wednesday, April 13, 2022, 6 pm 

Dia Chelsea
537 West 22nd Street
New York, New York

Aria Dean was born in Los Angeles in 1993. She is an artist, curator, and writer. Solo exhibitions of her work have been held at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; Centre d’Art ContemporainGenève, Switzerland; and Roy and Edna Disney CalArts Theater (REDCAT), Los Angeles. It has also been included in group exhibitions including the 2021 Hammer Museum biennial and the 2022 Whitney Biennial, among others. Dean’s essays on art and contemporary culture have appeared in Artforum, e-flux journal, and Texte zur Kunst, among other publications. She is a former curator of net art and digital culture at Rhizome, New York, and co-founder of the journal November. Dean lives in Brooklyn.

Aria Dean on Robert Morris

Saturday, February 4, 2023, 4:00 pm

Dia Chelsea
537 West 22nd Street
New York, New York

Andrea Fraser and Claudia Rankine will discuss the intersections between their recent works, This meeting is being recorded (2021) and Just Us: An American Conversation (2020), and their shared interests in subjects such as re-performing conversations, complicating notions of authority, the complex intersections of white privilege and antiracism work, and the emotional and psychological structures within these dynamics.

This program is presented in conjunction with Fraser’s solo exhibition at Marian Goodman Gallery New York.

Andrea Fraser was born in Billings, Montana in 1965. She is a professor in the department of art at the School of the Arts and Architecture at the University of California, Los Angeles. Since the mid-1980s, her work in the field of institutional critique has investigated the social, financial, and affective economies of cultural organizations, fields, and groups. Combining the site-specific and research-based approaches to conceptualism with feminist investigations of subjectivity and desire, Fraser works across the disciplines of performance, video, text, and a range of other forms. Her work has been exhibited in solo shows at, among others, the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Philadelphia Museum of Modern Art; Kunstlerhaus Stuttgart, Germany; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Retrospectives of her work have been presented at institutions including the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art; and Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City; and Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany. She has participated in the Venice and Shanghai Biennales; Whitney Biennial; Bienal de São Paulo; and Prospect New Orleans. Her project 2016 in Museums, Money, and Politics (2018) was named the best art book of the decade by ARTnews. She lives in Los Angeles.                               

Claudia Rankine is the author of five books of poetry, including Citizen: An American Lyric (2014) and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric (2004); three plays, including HELP (2020) and The White Card (2018), which was published by Graywolf Press in 2019; and has collaborated on numerous videos. Her recent collection of essays, Just Us: An American Conversation, was published by Graywolf Press in 2020. She is the co-editor of anthologies including The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind (2015). In 2016, Rankine co-founded The Racial Imaginary Institute (TRII). A former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, she is a professor in the creative writing program at New York University. She lives in New York.

Andrea Fraser and Claudia Rankine in Conversation

Valeria Luiselli, Ricardo Giraldo, and Leo Heiblum’s Echoes from the Borderlands is a series of captivating sound studies that explore the history of the U.S.–Mexico border. This 72-minute iteration, a condensed version of the longer work, accompanies the eponymous chapbook published by Dia.

Echoes from the Borderlands: Study One; Call You When I Get Home

Event details
Saturday, January 25, 2025
12–3:30 pm

Dia Beacon
3 Beekman Street
Beacon, New York

Free with museum admission.

Convened in conjunction with the presentation of Steve McQueen’s Bass (2024) at Dia Beacon, this symposium brings together artists and scholars to reflect on the work’s aesthetic and political resonances. Invited speakers Solveig Nelson, Michael E. Veal, and Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa will address the immersive installation through ideas of image-making and abstraction, music and reverberation, and representations of Black life and culture, while situating it in the context of McQueen’s past works. Afterward, writer Zoë Hopkins will moderate a group discussion between the speakers.

Visitors are encouraged to arrive to the museum early to experience Bass before the program begins.

For more than 30 years, McQueen has investigated the possibilities inherent in film—as a material, documentary tool, and storytelling medium—resulting in work that is formally inventive and politically pointed. With no representational or moving-image component, Bass is an environment comprising the most basic, structural elements of film: light and sound.

Schedule
Introduction by Donna De Salvo, senior adjunct curator, special projects
Speaker introductions by Emily Markert, curatorial assistant
Session I: Presentations by Solveig Nelson, Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa, and Michael Veal
Session II: Group discussion moderated by Zoë Hopkins followed by audience Q&A

Solveig Nelson is a curator, scholar, and art critic whose work focuses on the intersections between video, photography, and social movements. She received a PhD from the Art Institute of Chicago and was the American Council of Learned Societies Emerging Voices Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Art History at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. She currently is the curator of photography and new media at the Benton Museum in Pomona, California.

Michael E. Veal is a bassist, writer, and scholar of the cultural sphere of the Black Atlantic, with a focus on African and African American music. A “musical pan-Africanist,” he has taught at Yale University, New Haven, since 1998; he is currently the Henry L. and Lucy G. Moses Professor in the Department of Music as well as a Professor of African American and American Studies.

Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa is a British-Ugandan artist, writer, and editor. Recent publications include the photographicmonograph Hiding in Plain Sight, co-authored with fellow artist Ben Alper (2020), and Dark Mirrors (2021). Hissolo exhibition, Scene at Eastman, at the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York, closes on April 20, 2025.

Zoë Hopkins is a writer and critic focused on Conceptual art of the Black diaspora. Her writing has been featured in Artforum, Cultured, Hyperallergic, and The Brooklyn Rail. She is currently pursuing an MA in modern and contemporary art at Columbia University, New York.

A/V: Dan Wolfe, Jonny Taylor, and Mina Barden
Program support: Kimberly Golding

Steve McQueen Symposium: Bass

Readings in Contemporary Poetry
Taylor Mead and John Giorno
Thursday, October 14, 2010, 6:30 pm

Readings in Contemporary Poetry - John Giorno

Artists on Artists Lecture Series
Vera Lutter on Gerhard Richter
May 7, 2007

Artists on Artists Lecture - Vera Lutter on Gerhard Richter

Artists on Artists Lecture Series
Amy Sillman on John Chamberlain
April 28, 2008

Artists on Artists Lecture - Amy Sillman on John Chamberlain

Artists on Artists Lecture Series
An-My Lê on Michael Heizer
November 10, 2008

Artists on Artists Lecture - An-My Lê on Michael Heizer

Artists on Artists Lecture Series
Iman Issa on Donald Judd
Monday, March 3, 2014

Artists on Artists Lecture - Iman Issa on Donald Judd

Discussions in Contemporary Culture
Thomas Hirschhorn and Hal Foster
Saturday, September 15, 2012, 6:30 pm

Discussions in Contemporary Culture - Thomas Hirschhorn and Hal Foster

Book Launch
Gramsci Monument Book Launch with Thomas Hirschhorn
Saturday, May 16, 2015

Discussions in Contemporary Culture - Thomas Hirschhorn and Yasmil Raymond

Carol Bove on Donald Judd
Artists on Artists Lecture Series
Monday, September 24, 2012, 6:30 pm

Artists on Artists Lecture - Carol Bove on Donald Judd

Saturday, September 6, 2025
Dia Chelsea 

As part of the closing of Renée Green’s film installation Americas : Veritas, which she adapted into a site-responsive, four-channel format at Dia Chelsea, the artist joins curator and scholar Mason Leaver-Yap in conversation, moderated by Dia curator and co–department head Jordan Carter. This program coincides with Green’s major solo exhibition The Equator Has Moved on view at Dia Beacon through August 31, 2026.

A Conversation with Renée Green, Mason Leaver-Yap, and Jordan Carter

Tom Burr: Torrington Project Book Launch

Stephen Vitiello: Earth, from Tetrasomia, 2000, artist web project commissioned by Dia Art Foundation at diaart.org/vitiello

Stephen Vitiello: Fire, from Tetrasomia, 2000, artist web project commissioned by Dia Art Foundation at diaart.org/vitiello

Stephen Vitiello: Air, from Tetrasomia, 2000, artist web project commissioned by Dia Art Foundation at diaart.org/vitiello

Stephen Vitiello: Water, from Tetrasomia, 2000, artist web project commissioned by Dia Art Foundation at diaart.org/vitiello

Kent Monkman on the Hudson River School

Poetry &: Firespitter, a Jayne Cortez Celebration

Layli Long Soldier: Buffalo-Hide Painting and the Exquisite Endurance of Collective Memory

Tehching Hsieh, Adrian Heathfield, and Humberto Moro, with Special Guest Linda Montano

Tiona Nekkia McClodden on Melvin Edwards

Senga Nengudi: Populated Air Book Launch

Sam Gilliam Award Program: A Conversation with Sheela Gowda and Rattanamol Singh Johal

Wednesday, December 10, 2025
6:30 pm

Dia Chelsea 
537 West 22nd Street 
New York, New York 

Simon Leung was born in Hong Kong in1964. Since the 1990s, Leung has used the squatting body to create projects that engage in concepts of nationalism, property, labor, identity, and protest in the public space. Working across video, performance, sculpture, drawing, critical theory, fiction, and opera, Leung often links his work to context-specific sites, notably Hong Kong, Berlin, and Los Angeles. Recent presentations include the group exhibitions Another Beautiful Country, the Pacific Asia Museum, Pasadena (2024); Scratching at the Moon, Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2024); and Countering Time, Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong (2024–25); as well as My Friend the War, a performance with Jim Fletcher at Cabinet, Brooklyn (2022). Leung teaches at the University of California, Irvine, where he is a professor of art, Asian American studies, and critical theory.

Simon Leung on Tehching Hsieh

Poetry &: it’s an honor to be here, here I am an honor to be: a mad man with Funto Omojola

Readings in Contemporary Poetry
CAConrad and Cecilia Vicuña 
Tuesday, April 5, 2016, 6:30 pm

Readings in Contemporary Poetry - Cecilia Vicuña

Artists on Artists Lecture Series
David Reed on Blinky Palermo
October 17, 2005

Artists on Artists Lecture Series - David Reed on Blinky Palermo

Artists on Artists Lecture Series
Andrea Fraser on Fred Sandback
October 25, 2004

Artists on Artists Lecture Series - Andrea Fraser on Fred Sandback

Artists on Artists Lecture Series
Tacita Dean on Cy Twombly
October 9, 2003

Artists on Artists Lecture Series - Tacita Dean on Cy Twombly

Tuesday, December 19, 2017, 6:30 pm

Dia:Chelsea
535 West 22nd Street, 5th Floor
New York City 

Matt Keegan was born in Manhasset, New York, in 1976. In early 2017 his solo exhibition, Generation, was presented at Participant Inc. in New York. An iteration of this exhibition, titled Replicate, is on view at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts in Cambridge, Massachusetts (2017–18). In 2016 he realized the exhibition A Traveling Show with Kay Rosen, which was presented at the Contemporary Art Museum in Houston and Grazer Kunstverein in Graz, Austria. His work has also been included in recent group exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston (2016), CCS Bard Hessel Museum in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York (2016), Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (2015–16), and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (2015). Keegan’s first monograph, OR, was published by Inventory Press in conjunction with his 2015 solo exhibition, Portable Document Format, at Rogaland Kunstsenter, Stavanger, Norway. He lives and works in Brooklyn.

Jessica Dickinson was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota, in 1975. Recent solo exhibitions include Are: For + remainders at James Fuentes in New York (2017), and Are: at Altman Siegel in San Francisco (2016), along with a two-person exhibition with Alison Knowles at James Fuentes (2016). Her work was recently included in the group exhibitions Doubles, Dobros, Pliegues, Pares, Twins, Mitades (2017–18) at the Warehouse in Dallas, New Ruins (2017) at the American University Museum in Washington, DC, See sun, and think shadow (2016) at Gladstone Gallery in New York, and The Home Show (2015) at the apartment of Asad Raza in New York. In 2015 Inventory Press published the first monograph dedicated to her work, Under / Press. / With-This / Hold- / Of-Also / Of/How / Of-More / Of:Know. Dickinson lives and works in Brooklyn.

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