When Dia:Chelsea reopens in September 2020, with a new site-specific project by the Brazilian artist Renata Lucas, it will be with free admission. The Chelsea space will join four other Dia sites in New York City, including Walter De Maria’s “The New York Earth Room,” that are currently free. A sixth admission-free space, Dia:SoHo, will open in fall 2022.
Jessica Morgan, the Dia Art Foundation’s director, said in an interview, “Quite often our projects are either long term or even permanent.”
Dia’s aim, she added, has always been to encourage repeat visitation. “The idea is that if it’s a show that’s on for six or nine months that you would come back and see it on multiple occasions in different light, at different times of the year, feeling different, being different,” she said. Not having to pay an admission fee makes it easier for people to return to these pieces again and again.
The project that Ms. Lucas is developing for Dia:Chelsea is informed by Dia’s values and mission — and approaches these through the lens of her ongoing concerns with the built environment and the political and economic dimensions of space.
“She’s engaged with our own renovation and how our building is changing and how that relates to the old building across the street and all the other changes that have happened in this area,” Ms. Morgan said of Ms. Lucas.
To prepare the multipart piece, which has been in the works for nearly five years, Ms. Lucas visited several of Dia’s land art sites to situate herself within the history of artists associated Dia who have explored similar issues.
An exhibition of new commissions by Lucy Raven will follow Ms. Lucas’s work at Dia:Chelsea in March 2021.
