Earlier last week, I woke up at the crack of dawn to shlep to Grand Central to get on a morning train for Beacon. After passing the shockingly blue waters of the Hudson and its accompanying mountains and cliffs for an hour and a half, I arrived with my friend and jaunted over to the Dia:Beacon Museum just a few minutes from the station. Housed in an abandoned Nabisco factory, this museum is drop-dead gorgeous from every angle and the restoration was clearly meticulous. The museum is nothing short of immense, with the scale and emptiness of many halls and rooms being truly breathtaking. Architecturally, the piece de resistance is without a doubt the museums endless skylights that had light flooding in uncontrollably - blue skies were just beaming in and made the whites and neutrals light up and highlight the insanely contemporary and often colorful pieces that much more.
The curation widely ranges from immense and colorful Warhol rooms - unsure if I’m even allowed to call it a room considering it was larger than a football field - to geometric Judd installations, claustrophobic mazes of Sera’s in warehouses, gaping dark holes in the floor, shockingly bright Flavins and light installations imitating Berlin underground techno nightclubs, gruesome sculptures of crumbled capitalistic remnants and even a few errant meat cleavers in the wall. But what really united all of the pieces was their ability to make you feel emotion - which is really what art’s purpose is, even if it only sometimes achieves it. Here, it always achieves it. The way every piece interacts with the walls and light in each space is unique and purposefully designed to make viewers have evolving emotional relationships with the pieces, the artists, and the museum as a whole as they go room to room. From emptiness, to overwhelm, gross gruesomeness to peaceful wholesomeness, the pieces really made my friend and I feel every shade of the rainbow and it honestly built a feeling of excitement for what would be next as we toured.
The pieces are so different - like SO different - from room to room, ranging era, medium, movement, and intention, yet they all really felt connected in how they publicly moved those in the museum. Of note is the fact that there is nearly no wall text whatsoever, and as such, no sense of obligation to look like you cared to read those often boring lumps of biographical text that can be overbearing. It felt so free to go exhibit to exhibit, googling information on the artist if I cared to, if not, using the art history background my friend and I built at school to analyze as best as we could - it felt like we were really able to just analyze how we felt about the piece on a personal level with no red tape.
While this museum is a thanksgiving feast for the eyes as a result of its immacualte and aesthetically-driven curation program, it is not an Instagram museum, and it is not a place for tourists - and thank god for that. So many museums in major cities have just become tourist attractions for those seeking to post pictures of Kusamas' or Koons' and leaving, that the act of really enjoying art for what it is can feel overlooked. Not here, not at the Dia. Probably because only the most driven of contemporary art fanatics will trek in trains and cars to this paradise upstate, but that journey was a piece of beauty on its own.
Dia Beacon
3 Beekman St, Beacon, NY 12508
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