Dia Art Foundation

The Dia Art Foundation is a foundation initiated the art projects of all kinds and support and a private art museum ( Dia: Beacon ) maintains. It was founded in 1974 by Philippa de Menil, a subsidiary of the art conveyor Dominique de Menil of Houston, and her husband, the art dealer Heiner Friedrich. The name slide was removed from the Greek, meaning "with". The founder couple chose the name to indicate that the Foundation supports artistic projects that would otherwise not be implemented due to its character or magnitude.

Among the funded projects belonged to the museum complex of the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, and the 7000 Oaks project of Joseph Beuys.

The founders gathered in the first decade of works by Joseph Beuys, John Chamberlain, Walter De Maria, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Imi Knoebel, Blinky Palermo, Fred Sandback, Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol, Robert Whitman and La Monte Young.

Since 1997, the Foundation put on its own collection for a planned art museum. The first for donated art objects were three sculptures from Richard Serra's Torqued Ellipses series ( 1996-97), the Serra had created for an exhibition in the warehouses of the Dia Foundation in Chelsea ( Manhattan).

Through purchases, gifts and permanent loans, the permanent collection has been extended to works of the artists Bernd and Hilla Becher, Louise Bourgeois, Michael Heizer, Robert Irwin, Darboven, Katharina Fritsch, Ann Hamilton, Jenny Holzer, On Kawara, Sol LeWitt, Agnes Martin, Bruce Nauman, Gerhard Richter, Robert Ryman, Robert Smithson, Diana Thater, Rosemarie Trockel and Lawrence Weiner.

With Dia: Beacon, the Foundation has created her own museum, which was opened on the banks of the Hudson in Beacon in the U.S. state of New York, 2003.