Introducing the first blog post from NYC will be about our trip upstate to Dia Beacon. We took the train for about 90 min to Beacon, located on the Hudson River. Only a short walk from the station in an old Nabisco factory (National Biscuit company) is Dia:Beacon. The galleries in total is nearly 300,000-square-foot and was opened in may 2003. It’s run by Dia Art Foundation and holds a permanent collection of major works of art from the 1960s to the present.

Dia Art Foundation was founded to support individual artists and to provide places where their art could be displayed without being split up. Dia:Beacon’s galleries were specifically designed to display those artworks, many of which, because of their character or size, can’t easily be accommodated by more conventional museums. Each artist’s work is displayed in a dedicated gallery, chosen and created in collaboration with the artists themselves.

One of my favourites is a piece by Andy Warhol specifically because all its consisting 154 canvases, are shown together in one big gallery, just like the artist had wanted it.

Dia has also kept a lot of the structure from the old factory. The hole museum isl lit only by natural light from the skylight windows on the roof. Making the opening hours shorter during wintertime.

Personally I think the most spectacular piece is probably the presentation of wall drawings by Sol LeWitt. The drawings were selected by the artist himself but were not executed by him. Sol LeWitt gave exact instructions on how to execute and show his drawing. The ones shown at Dia:Beacon were executed there for the first time.