Dia Art Foundation

Dia Art Foundation is committed to advancing, realizing, and preserving the vision of artists. Dia fulfills its mission by commissioning single artist projects, organizing exhibitions, realizing site-specific installations, and collecting in-depth the work of a focused group of artists of the 1960s and 1970s.

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 it consists of nine permanent sites across the United States and Germany, as well as three changing exhibition spaces in New York State: Dia Chelsea in New York City, Dia Beacon in the Hudson Valley, and Dia Bridgehampton on Long Island.