DON STAHL
The director position at the Dia Art Foundation, filled by Jessica Morgan since 2015, has been endowed for the future by way of a gift from Nathalie and Charles de Gunzburg. The post will now be named for Nathalie de Gunzburg, who is chairman of Dia’s board.
About Morgan, whom she helped bring to the New York-based institution from London two years ago, de Gunzburg told ARTnews, “She’s an extremely bright young woman with incredible energy and vision. She’s the leader that Dia was waiting for.”
Since the beginning of her tenure at Dia, following years as a curator at Tate Modern and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston before that, Morgan has invigorated the institution in ways old and new. She has engaged the foundation’s storied history with notable presentations of work by artists from Dia’s founding stable (Walter De Maria, La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, Dan Flavin) and brought historic contemporaries into the collection (Anne Truitt, Brice Marden, Robert Ryman, Michelle Stuart, Lee Ufan, Kishio Suga). Morgan has also expanded the range of projects upstate at Dia:Beacon and in Manhattan in Chelsea, where a work involving lasers and mist by Rita McBride is currently on show next to a retrospective of François Morellet in two of Dia’s buildings in the neighborhood.
“She has increased the collection, incorporated women artists, reopened the program in Chelsea, organized programs in Beacon—she has made Dia alive and moving forward in the right direction while staying true to the mission,” de Gunzburg said of Morgan. “It’s clear she has an understanding of the institution, not only its history but also where it should go.”
About the endowment, Morgan said in a statement, “This transformative gift will have an enduring impact on the institution. A gift of this nature underscores the high value that the de Gunzburgs place on Dia and is a significant affirmation of the institution and its future.”