Dia Chelsea, New York. Photo: Elizabeth Felicella. Courtesy of Dia Art Foundation,
New York.
For major museums and galleries, a renovation is a statement. The announcements usually look the same: X starchitect will lead Y’s redesign that cost Z millions of dollars. Z is always a big number.
But the Dia Art Foundation has opted to tweak the traditional formula instead of going big, it has opted to go subtle. The Minimalism-focused organization opens its renovated 20,000-square-foot home in West Chelsea, New York, on Friday after a two-year renovation.
In 2018, when Dia first announced a fundraising campaign to upgrade its campuses, including a redesign of its three contiguous industrial buildings in Chelsea, it said the goal was to raise $90 million. That’s a big number, to be sure. But only $20 million an uncharacteristically small figure for such a prominent project was put toward the renovation in Chelsea. The rest was put back into the organization’s endowment for futur
Dia reopened in Chelsea, after a two-year renovation Photo: Elizabeth Felicella, courtesy of Dia
In 1987, when the Dia Foundation established an outpost for art in what was then a low-slung spread of taxi garages and auto repair shops, the Chelsea of today was unimaginable. At five storeys, Dia’s building was one of the tallest in the area, which felt remote from the dozens of galleries, bars, shops and high concentration of artists in SoHo. That lack of distraction was perfect for Dia, which carved space out of time for the long, slow absorption of its commissioned, year-long exhibitions.
Yet in a scenario that has been repeated so frequently it seems to have been ordained by an unnamed master of the universe, art made a wilderness safe for development. Dia sold its building when structural repairs proved more expensive than building anew, which it only did in Beacon, but it held onto three other properties on West 22nd Street. Unfortunately, succeeding may
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This week, Dia Chelsea reopens to the public after a two-year and reportedly $20 million renovation. Designed by Architecture Research Office (ARO), the 32,500-square-foot site combines three contiguous buildings on West 22nd Street into a space that encompasses 20,000 square feet for exhibitions, a “talk space” for public and educational programming, and Dia’s bookstore.
Dia has long had a footprint in that area, opening its first Chelsea outpost in 1987; several years before commercial galleries did the same. At the time, it represented a decisive break from the white-box SoHo exhibition space, embracing instead the brick, steel, and general grit of a neighborhood primarily known for its warehouses and auto-repair shops. The new Dia Chelsea rekindles some of that old roughness, says curator Alexis Lowry. “I’m a biased judge, but I think the architects have done a really, really beautiful job of essential