Dia Art Foundation Appoints a Tate Modern Curator as Its Director

By RANDY KENNEDYSEPT. 10, 2014

Jessica Morgan

CreditOlivia Hemingway

The Dia Art Foundation, which turned 40 this year and is struggling to re-establish its presence in a Manhattan much more crowded and expensive than the one in which it was founded, announced Wednesday that it had chosen Jessica Morgan, a curator at the Tate Modern in London, to be its new director.

Ms. Morgan, a widely respected British curator who spent her formative years working in the United States before joining the Tate in 2002 as a curator of contemporary art, will take over Dia at an uncertain time in its history. Its extensive collection, deep in Minimalist and Conceptualist works from the 1960s and 1970s, is housed at Dia:Beacon, an outpost in upstate New York that opened along the Hudson River in 2003 and that has become a celebrated museum. But Dia began as an institution dedicated to supporting long-term projects by living artists, and for several years now, it has been trying to raise money to build a space for such endeavors in Manhattan, after outgrowing its two locations on West 22nd Street in Chelsea and closing them in 2004.

Nathalie de Gunzburg, the chairwoman of Dia’s board, said that 60 percent of the money for a new building on West 22nd Street had been raised, but that the project had been stalled after the sudden departure early this year of Dia’s previous director, Philippe Vergne, who left to take over the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. Ms. de Gunzburg said the board felt that a new director should be able to make the formative decisions about a new building. And after several interviews with Ms. Morgan, she said, trustees on the search committee believed she had both the fund-raising and leadership ability to see the project through and to move Dia forward.

“Will she keep the project the way it is?” Ms. de Gunzburg said. “I don’t know. We have unanswered questions until she’s here.” She added, “We want to give her the freedom to express her vision.”

Since 2010, Ms. Morgan, 45, has been the curator of international art at the Tate Modern and has expanded the geographic scope of the museum’s exhibitions and permanent collections. Though her work has been mostly curatorial — she was previously the chief curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston and a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago — she said in an interview Wednesday that as museums across Europe confronted dwindling government support, her job at the Tate had ended up involving considerable fund-raising. “To be perfectly honest, it’s something I quite enjoy,” she said.

She said she hoped not only to bring a broader international focus to Dia, but to also find a way for it to distinguish itself in a city ever more populated with contemporary-art museums. (The Whitney Museum of American Art opens its much larger new home along the High Line next year, and soon after, the Metropolitan Museum of Art will begin to show contemporary art in the Whitney’s old building on the Upper East Side.) Against that backdrop, Ms. Morgan said, it is “all the more vital that Dia retain its significance in terms of its relationship to living artists.”

“But it has to be a relationship that’s relevant to the current moment,” she said. “It can’t rest on a notion of its past.” Divisions over how Dia should evolve were brought to the fore last year, when it auctioned off notable pieces from its collection by artists like Cy Twombly, John Chamberlain and Barnett Newman to begin an acquisition fund. The sale, which raised $38 million, was criticized by many in the art world as a betrayal of the foundation’s roots, and two of Dia’s founders briefly filed suit to stop the auction.

Besides Beacon, Dia oversees site-specific installations like Walter De Maria’s “Lightning Field” near Quemado, N.M., and Robert Smithson’s “Spiral Jetty” earth sculpture in northern Utah. The foundation has often struggled to find enough money to support its ambitions. In 2006, amid board disagreements, it lost its chief patron, Leonard Riggio, the chairman of Barnes & Noble, who had been pivotal in establishing the Beacon outpost. In 2009, it announced plans to build on the site of one its previous homes on West 22nd Street, but it has yet to break ground.

Ms. de Gunzburg said the hope now was to have the new building underway within the next three years, “at a maximum.” But she added, “The last 40 percent is always harder to raise, of course.”

A version of this article appears in print on September 11, 2014, on page C2 of the New York edition with the headline: Dia Art Foundation Appoints a Tate Modern Curator as Its Director. 

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