On the sunniest summer day this July, I hired a car from Manhattan, and drove for about 1h to Storm King Sculpture Park. I spent about 3h wandering the grounds of the park; I had lunch at a fabulous restaurant by the riverside on the way to Dia:Beacon and finished the day at Dia museum before returning to New York in time for supper. This is an art trip dedicated to sculpture in all its glory and all its forms.
Storm King Art Center is a 500-acre outdoor museum located in New York’s Hudson Valley, where visitors experience large-scale sculpture and site-specific commissions under open sky. Since 1960, Storm King has been dedicated to stewarding the hills, meadows, and forests of its site and surrounding landscape. Building on the visionary thinking of its founders, Storm King exhibits, acquires, borrows, and conserves modern and contemporary art, focusing on large-scale sculpture sited in the Art Center’s expansive landscape.
Dia was founded in New York City in 1974 by Philippa de Menil, Heiner Friedrich, and Helen Winkler to help artists achieve visionary projects that might not otherwise be realized because of scale or scope. To suggest the institution’s role in enabling such ambitions, they selected the name “Dia,” taken from the Greek word meaning “through.”
Today, Dia is a constellation of sites, from the iconic permanent, site-specific artworks and installations in New York, the American West and Germany; to an exhibition program that has commissioned dozens of breakthrough projects; to the vast galleries of Dia:Beacon; and finally the programs of education and public engagement. Dia:Beacon mostly holds the in-depth collection of works of a focused group of artists of the 1960s and 1970s.
