Dodie Kazanjian has a solid profile of Dia’s Jessica Morgan that makes one refreshing point, she doesn’t want to build put on blockbusters (even if her Robert Ryman show is the one to see in New York right now.)
Jessica Morgan may be the only museum director in America who doesn’t want to build new spaces or expand existing ones. Not long after she took over the Dia Art Foundation a year ago, she scrapped a $60 million plan to turn three industrial buildings in Chelsea into a unified new exhibition and project space (which would have taken years to complete), and announced that Dia would start using the buildings right away, as is. It was a counterintuitive move that proved radical and right. With two exhibitions in the last year—La Monte Young’s “Dream House” and a Robert Ryman show—word spread that after nearly a dozen years without a Manhattan site for new exhibitions, Dia, which had moved its collection out of the city to a former Nabisco printing plant in Beacon, New York, in 2003, was back in town. “Let’s get on with the programming,” Morgan tells me. “Enough already about building.” […]
What really made her take the job was hearing that Dia was not driven by the pressure to do blockbuster shows and attract big audiences. “There are very few, if any, institutions that are not overwhelmed with the responsibility to bring in large numbers of people. Where else could I do a program without being asked, ‘Is anyone going to come?’ That conversation is just not relevant here, and that was very liberating.”
