Dia Bridgehampton

The building housing Dia Bridgehampton was built in 1908 as a firehouse.[3] The fire department later moved out of the shingle-style building[1] and The First Baptist Church of Bridgehampton occupied the building from 1924 through the mid-1970s.[3] In 1974, the Dia Art Foundation was established by Heiner Friedrich and Schlumberger heiress Philippa de Menil, as well as Helen Winkler to help artists realize ambitious projects whose scale and scope is not feasible within the normal museum and gallery systems.[4] In 1979 the Dia Art Foundation purchased the former firehouse and church building explicitly to house a long term exhibition of Dan Flavin's work as well as a rotating exhibition space. Flavin was a resident of Wainscot, a nearby town.[3]

Over the next four years the building was renovated by the architect Richard Gluckman, under the direction of Flavin. Gluckman's first experience working with an artist was with assisting Flavin on a 1977 installation for the Dia founders Heiner Friedrich and Philippa de Menil, and his first commission to create a full scale art gallery was for the Dia Center for the Arts on West 22nd Street, now Dia Chelsea.[5] The renovation of the former firehouse and church was sympathetic, acknowledging the past use of the structure but transforming the spaces so they could now be used as art gallery. The newel post was painted fire-engine-red and small gallery on the second floor was created to hold memorabilia from the renovation process including the church doors and a neon cross.[3]

The building opened in 1983 as the Dan Flavin Art Institute with the building's vestibule and second floor dedicated to a permanent display of Flavin's work. The first floor was designed to be a rotating exhibition space and a print shop.[1]

Without any physical changes to the structure occurring, Dia switched from calling this building the "Dan Flavin Art Institute" to calling it "Dia Bridgehampton" between a November 21, 2019 and a January 29, 2020 press release.[6][7] Now, the "Dan Flavin Art Institute" is considered to only be the Flavin works inside Dia Bridgehampton, while the rotating gallery makes up the rest of "Dia Bridgehampton". One exhibit per year is displayed in this rotating gallery with a focus on presenting work by artists living or working on Long Island.[1]

The Dan Flavin Art Institute, within Dia Bridgehampton, consists of nine works in fluorescent light, as well as one drawing, all by Dan Flavin and all on permanent display. The institute opened with the building in 1983 and is a mini-retrospective touching on each of the major type of work he created with this medium. Dia expresses, in the pamphlet describing the institute, that the lights and the architecture should be viewed as a "single, continuous installation," and that "Flavin provided an experience built of provocative contrasts—between colors, intensities of light, structure and formlessness, the obvious and the curious, the serious and the humorous."[3]

The following table lists the works on permanent display.[3]

The first floor of Dia Bridgehampton houses a gallery where temporary exhibitions are presented. This gallery was originally envisioned by Flavin as a venue for changing exhibitions as well as a print shop.[1] When the Dan Flavin Art Institute opened in 1983 the first exhibit in this gallery was a presentation of Flavin's the diagonal of May 25th, 1963 (to Constantin Brancusi), his first work using fluorescent light fixtures, and preparatory drawings.[8]

The gallery has gone through many different curatorial shifts since this first exhibit. The first set of exhibitions were organized directly by Flavin, with the first being a selection of paintings by Michael Venezia presented in 1983.[1][9] These early exhibitions focused on contemporary artists of the time, historic artists and crafts persons, as well as Flavin's own work.[10] Exhibitions of this time period included drawings by James Brooks[11] and an exhibition of Locally made arts and crafts style art, furniture, and pottery in 1984,[12] and the presentation of Flavin's Untitled (To My Dear Bitch, Airily) 2 in 1985.[13][14] This series of exhibits culminated in 1987 with a memorial tribute exhibition to Andy Warhol, exhibited five months after his death, featuring paintings by Warhol, photography by Stephen Shore, and Native American blankets from Warhol's collection.[15]

In 1987 Dia reassessed the direction the first floor gallery should take and turned to Henry Geldzahler, the former curator of 20th-century art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, to curate a new series. He broke each season into three exhibits, two solo shows for aspects of singular artists careers, and one larger group show of works by artists living in the East End of Long Island.[16]This new format began in 1988 and brought exhibitions by artist such as Cy Twombly that year,[16] Louise Bourgeois in 1989,[8][17] Enrique Castro-Cid in 1990,[18] Alice Neel in 1991,[19] John Chamberlain[20] and another exhibition of Andy Warhol work, this time focusing on his oxidation paintings, in 1992,[21] and Manuel Neri in 1993.[22]

In 1995 a new series was initiated with the exhibit Dan Flavin's Collection of Japanese Drawings and Prints, a display of objects drawn directly from Flavin's art collection and organized by him.[10] This series was supposed to be organized by Flavin,[10] but he died the next year. For several years after the gallery was used to display his work including his drawings in 1997 and 1998,[23][24]and a selection of his early wall sculptures consisting of boxes and incandescent and fluorescent lights from 1999 to 2003.[25][26]

Dia returned the gallery to presenting artists other than Flavin with a three-year long exhibit of prints by Fred Sandback from 2004-2006,[27][28] an exhibit of foam and paper sculptures by John Chamberlin's in 2007,[28] and two exhibits by Imi Knoebel in 2008 and 2009-2010, called Knife Cuts Part 1 and Knife Cuts Part 2, which collectively showed roughly 70 of the 80 panels of his large scale collage Untitled (1977).[29][30] 2010 also saw a short exhibition of Flavin's drawings of the Hudson valley in relationship to drawing made by the Hudson River School in the late 19th century.[31]

For the next several years the gallery was largely used to present exhibitions that related to, or were extensions of, larger exhibits at Dia Beacon or elsewhere. These exhibitions included a series of works on paper as part of Koo Jeong A's Constellation Congress from 2010-11,[32] new work by Jean-Luc Moulène which accompanied Opus + One at Diia Beacon in 2011-12,[33] and A Friendship: Carl Andre’s Works on Paper from the LeWitt Collection which included Poetry, collage, and works on paper by Carl Andre presented n conjunction with a retrospective of his work at Dia Beacon.[34] Another exhibition of works by John Chamberlin was also presented in 2013-14.[35] This was once again followed by a several-year long exhibit of Flavin's early wall sculptures consisting of boxes and incandescent and fluorescent lights from 2015-2017.[26]

Since 2017, The exhibitions in the first-floor gallery are primarily displays of work by a single artist who resides or works on Long Island.[1] For these exhibitions Dia invites artists to consider the space they are exhibiting in. Artists have used this prompt to make work that responds to the Flavin sculptures in the gallery upstairs, the history of the building, the land, and the surrounding region, or interactions with the sensibilities and physical qualities of the space.[36] Artists presenting in this series include Mary Heilmann (2017-2018),[37] Keith Sonnier (2018-2019),[38] Jacqueline Humphries (2019-2020),[39] and Jill Magid (2020-2021).[40]

Recently the exhibitions, while based largely in the first floor gallery, have included elements beyond the walls of the building. Maren Hassinger included a new galvanized steel rope sculpture installed in Dia Bridgehampton’s back lawn for her 2021-2022 exhibit,[41] Leslie Hewitt installed a bronze silhouette on a boulder also on the backyard in 2022-2023,[42] and Tony Cokes purchased advertisements on nearby electronic billboards owned by the Shinnecock Indian Nation in 2023-2024.[43]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Dia Bridgehampton.

• Dia artwork pages for works in the Dan Flavin Art Institute:
  • untitled, 1976
  • untitled (to Robert, Joe, and Michael), 1975-81
  • untitled (to Jan and Ron Greenberg), 1972-73
  • untitled (in honor of Harold Joachim) 3, 1977
  • untitled (to Katharina and Christoph), 1966–71
  • untitled (to Jim Schaeufele) 1, 1972
  • (to Jim Schaeufele) 2, 1972
  • untitled (to Jim Schaeufele) 3, 1972