drama at DIA

An hour north of New York City, in the small Hudson River Valley town of Beacon, there sits an enormous art museum — indeed, with 240,000 square feet of gallery space, it is one of the largest museums to open in this country since the Museum of Modern Art in the late 1930s. Called Dia:Beacon, it houses a fabulous collection of contemporary art: massive torqued sculptures by Richard Serra, minimalist boxes by Donald Judd, string sculptures by Fred Sandback. A gallery the size of a football field is devoted to the iconic fluorescent-light sculptures of Dan Flavin; another gallery, every bit as large, displays 15 equally iconic scrap-metal sculptures by John Chamberlain. A single Andy Warhol wraps around all four walls of one big room. Twenty-five artists, almost all of them people who in the ’60s and ’70s helped to create the language of contemporary art, take up the entirety of Dia:Beacon. The art represents the permanent collection of the New York City-based Dia Art Foundation. Until Dia:Beacon was built, much of this art had spent decades in storage because Dia had no place to show it.

more from the NY Times Magazine here.