Event details
Saturday, March 1, 2025
2 pm

Dia Beacon
3 Beekman Street
Beacon, New York

Free with museum admission.

DJ and educator Jive Poetic’s hybrid poetry-prose memoir Skip Tracer (2024) blends memories of his childhood and adolescence with his extensive genealogical research to uncover the many paths his ancestors took in the New World—Jamaica, Brazil, Cuba, Panama, and the United States—as well as sojourns in Britain. To skip trace is to search for someone’s whereabouts, particularly that of the missing or of a person who does not want to be found. Despite the unfathomable losses of identity, family, language, and culture in the Middle Passage, family stories passed-down, correspondence, legal records, and other artifacts are evidence of not just daily existence but also resistance to ongoing oppression from the de jure segregation of earlier eras to long-standing police violence against black and brown communities. For this event, inspired in part by Steve McQueen’s Bass (2024) on view in Dia Beacon’s lower-level gallery, Jive Poetic remixes live audio, video, and imagery from the book while sampling other important artistic and cultural references to the diaspora, using poetry and music to tell a new story of struggle and resilience.

Jive Poetic is a Brooklyn-based writer, organizer, and educator. He received his BA in media studies from the State University of New York at Buffalo and his MFA in writing and activism from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn. Jive Poetic is the founder of Insurgent Poets Society and Carnival Slam: Cultural Exchange, as well as a co-founder of the Brooklyn Poetry Slam. In 2017, he became the first recipient of the John Morning Award for Art and Service.

Poetry &: Skip Tracer with Jive Poetic

March 21, 2025

Swamp Summit: Dirt and Water is a two-day convening organized by Dia Art Foundation, Storefront for Art and Architecture, and the Graham Foundation. The gathering aims to examine the relationship between natural and built environments at the boundary where water meets land. Using the unstable grounds of the swamp as a conceptual underpinning, this summit addresses the politics of water in different geographies—from the Gulf of Mexico to the Mekong River. Through their unique approaches to spatial research and art making, participants will discuss pressing issues related to the legacies of art and ecology, as well as the impact of industry and human-induced environmental disasters on historically excluded communities.

The convening coincides with the conclusion of Swamplands, Storefront’s yearlong research and program series, and converses with recent and upcoming projects at Dia that examine the same themes. It also honors the history of institutional relationships shaped by intertwined curatorial interests.

While the first day of the summit is closed for Swamp Summit participants, the public is invited to join on March 21 for a series of engagements at Dia Chelsea taking place from 5 to 7:45 pm.

Schedule 
Friday, March 21, Dia Chelsea

5 pm | Introduction 
José Esparza Chong Cuy, Sarah Herda, and Humberto Moro

5:10 pm | Poetry reading 
Mayan poet and water-rights activist Pedro Uc Be

5:15 pm | Presentation 
On Indigeneity and Water by Yásnaya Aguilar, followed by a conversation with Pedro Uc Be, moderated by Abraham Cruzvillegas

6:10 pm | Reading
Season of the Swamp by Yuri Herrera, introduced by Guillermo Ruiz de Teresa

6:20 pm | Conversation
Jingru (Cyan) Cheng, Sky Hopinka, and Chen Zhan, moderated by Matilde Guidelli-Guidi

7:15 pm | Performative lecture
On Wetlands by Cooking Sections, introduced by Jessica Kwok

Swamp Summit: Dirt and Water

Saturday, March 29, 2025
12–3 pm

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

Poet and vocalist LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs debuts a new multimedia project comprising the publication In Search of Sugarcane and the video The Break-Up (both 2025) as part of a “memorial service” at Dia Chelsea. The publication draws from Diggs’s book Village (2023) and magnifies it with a hybrid essay documenting the purchase of a five-story postwar building in Central Harlem as well as its surrounding block and community. Meanwhile, in The Break-Up, made in collaboration with Gabri Christa and modeled on the works of Theo Anthony and Chris Marker, a native Harlemite is determined to fight and remain in a rent-stabilized apartment despite the ghosts and memories that speak through the sounds of active demolition, water leaks, and unwelcome visitors. A performative installation—featuring the video, an altar to Diggs’s Apartment 5RE, and the accompanying publication—takes inspiration from the state of tenant rights in New York and the mysterious phenomena known as “UEO” (unidentified European owner) to call for awareness to the national housing crisis, displacement, and the embodied impact of spatial and communal memory. Using text, performance, and moving-image, Diggs poses the questions: When is home no longer home? What are the dilemmas and legacies that perplex the native Harlemite? Why are UEOs like the Loch Ness Monster? 

The viewing starts at 12 pm and the service begins at 2 pm.

LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs was born and raised in New York. She is an interdisciplinary poet, sound artist, and author of TwERK (2013) and Village (2023), among other titles. Diggs’s work is truly hybrid: Languages and modes are grafted together and furl out insistently from each bound splice. Diggs has received a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship (2015), a Whiting Award (2016), and a C.D. Wright Award for Poetry from the Foundation of Contemporary Art (2020), as well as grants and fellowships from Cave Canem, Creative Capital, Howard Foundation, and the Japan–United States Friendship Commission. Diggs has performed at an array of venues from CalArts, Valencia, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, to poetry festivals in Denmark and Romania. As an independent curator, artistic director, and producer, she has presented events for BAMCafé, Brooklyn; Lincoln Center Out of Doors, New York; and El Museo del Barrio, New York. She teaches at Brooklyn and Barnard Colleges and lives in New York.

Gabri Christa was born and raised in Curaçao. She is a transdisciplinary artist whose work explores social issues through a postcolonial and experimental lens, and her creative practice centers multigenerational work. Her award-winning films have been screened at international festivals, museums, and galleries, and her latest screendance film, KANKANTRI (Silk Cotton Tree, 2024), is touring to various festivals worldwide. Christa was named one of the world’s 100 best filmmakers at Pangea Day (2008), a TED project, and awards for her choreography include a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship (1999). An Atlantic Fellow for Equity in Global Brain Health, she is an associate professor of professional practice at Barnard College, New York, as well as founding director of the college’s Movement Lab, and founder of the Moving Body – Moving Image Festival. Christa lives in New York and is on the city’s Cultural Affairs Advisory Commission.

Poetry &: In Search of Sugarcane / The Break-Up with LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs and Gabri Christa

Martine Syms was born in Los Angeles in 1988. Syms’s work across media and genres, often employing humor and narration, explores notions of the self within popular culture. Recent solo presentations include Projects 106: Martine Syms, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2017); She Mad: Season One, Bergen Kunsthall, Norway (2021–22), and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2022–23); and Total, Lafayette Anticipations, Paris (2024–25). Recent group exhibitions include those at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2022); Kunsthal Charlottenborg Biennale, Copenhagen (2023); and the Art Museum at the University of Toronto (2024–25). As a filmmaker, Syms directed She Mad: Bitch Zone (2020) and The African Desperate (2022). She is the author of several books including Implications and Distinctions: Format, Content, and Context in Contemporary Race Film (2011), Neural Swamp (2022), and She Mad (2024). Syms lives in Los Angeles. 

Martine Syms on Walter De Maria

Wednesday, April 16, 2025
6:30 pm

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

Join Madame Architect’s Kate Reggev for a conversation with Dia director Jessica Morgan and Architecture Research Office’s Kim Yao and Adam Yarinsky about the design of Dia Chelsea. The conversation is introduced by Madame Architect editor-in-chief Julia Gamolina.

Madame Architect Presents: Dia’s Jessica Morgan with Architecture Research Office’s Kim Yao and Adam Yarinsky

Event details 
Saturday, April 19, 2025
2 pm 

Dia Beacon
3 Beekman Street
Beacon, New York

Free with museum admission.

Artist Max Hooper Schneider discusses the work of Lucas Samaras and Meg Webster—both on long-term view at Dia Beacon—reflecting on the intersections of their practices as well as their combined influence on his own.

Max Hooper Schneider was born in Los Angeles in 1982. He graduated from Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 2011 with a master’s degree in landscape architecture. The foregrounding of material technologies and tactics of defamiliarization within the fields of biology, philosophy, landscape architecture, and varying subcultures continue to inform his polymathic practice. Hooper Schneider’s work explores and develops the aesthetics of succession, abandonment, and the uncanny through the creation of habitats and installations that materialize and dramatize nature in diverse ways. In his practice, nature is conceived as a process of ceaseless morphogenic modulation, a relentless onslaught in which bodies, as formed matters, are continuously created, transformed, and destroyed. The resultant work voids the difference between the natural and the artificial, challenges conventional systems of both scientific and artistic classification, upsets valuations of high and low culture, and suggests a worldview that strives to dislocate humans from their assumed position of centrality and superiority as knowers and actors in the world. Obsessive travel, documentation, and field work in distant regions, as well as the sacrificing of his own material compositions to environmental elements, remain integral to his codex of artistic procedures. He continues to experiment across institutions, venues, and outdoor sites locally and internationally and his work is held in major public and private collections around the world. Hooper Schneider lives in Los Angeles.

Dia Talks: Max Hooper Schneider on Lucas Samaras and Meg Webster

Steffani Jemison with Leslie Cuyjet on Maren Hassinger and Senga Nengudi

Friday, May 2, 2025
6:30 pm

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

Dia is proud to host artist Delcy Morelos and curators Alexis Lowry and Zuna Maza for a conversation around the recently published Delcy Morelos, the companion volume to the artist’s recent exhibition at Dia Chelsea, Delcy Morelos: El abrazo (The Embrace), and the first book published about her work in the United States. For more than a decade, Morelos has worked primarily with earth, creating immersive environments of geometrically abstract forms. Drawing on Indigenous cosmologies, her work explores the sustaining power of mud in its many forms, as a source of life and sustenance. This bilingual monograph approaches Morelos’s two soil-based installations, Cielo terrenal (2023) and El abrazo (2023), to explore the artist’s role in the history of Land art. The texts consider the natural materials used in her Dia commission and their sensory, spatial, and phenomenological impact. The volume also features a selection of stories sourced from Indigenous Colombian communities—Bará, Matapí, Tanimuca, M+n+ca, Uitoto N+pode, and Yucuna Kamejeyá—that underscore Morelos’s acute understanding of the sacred relationship between land and its inhabitants.

Delcy Morelos Book Launch

In collaboration with the Fred Sandback Archive and Dancing Foxes Press, Dia is pleased to announce the publication of Interaction: Fifty Years of Fred Sandback and Dia Art Foundation (2024).

In 1968, sculptor Fred Sandback (1943–2003) mounted his first solo exhibition at Heiner Friedrich’s Munich gallery, displaying works made from elastic cord or acrylic yarn that traced planes and volumes in space. Thus began a long-term relationship that extended to Dia Art Foundation, the institution Friedrich co-founded in 1974. Until now, little has been published on Sandback’s extraordinary alliance with Dia. Essayists Julian M. Rose, Corinna Thierolf, and Edward A. Vazquez, with conversation partners Matilde Guidelli-Guidi and Curtis Harvey, explore archival documents, sketches, and photographs to reveal how the institution offered Sandback both space and time to meticulously hone his sculptural interventions in the architectural environments of Dia, including the Fred Sandback Museum in Winchendon, Massachusetts, and Dia Beacon in the Hudson Valley.

In conjunction with the book launch, a conversation between the publication’s authors takes place at Dia Chelsea, presented by Dia’s director Jessica Morgan and moderated by deputy director of program Humberto Moro.

Interaction: A Fred Sandback Book Launch

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.

Steffani Jemison with Leslie Cuyjet on Maren Hassinger and Senga Nengudi

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