Dia Beacon

We went to Dia Beacon after receiving several recommendations from friends. It was a fantastic experience. The guided tour is an absolute must! It provides you with a lot more perspective on the art works and the guide helps you experience them in new ways. Bookshop has a good selection of books, gifts and postcards. Cafe is perfect if you don’t have time to go to Main Street.

Interesting post post modern art. There will be not a few people who will wonder is it really art. Yet, the combination of the interior of this very special museum-building ( was a factory in the past) makes the experience very unique. The scenery on the way - the Hudson valley - makes the trip from New York - worth

I found the building itself to be more fascinating than the art. Definitely go when it is sunny out. It's a former Nabisco printing plant.

The art was very experimental; a few pieces were cool but most of it was silly and I love modern art.

If you are in the area, it's still worth a stop. I wish I could roller skate thru the building. It's that big!

Walking into Dia Beacon feels like entering a cathedral of perception. The former Nabisco box-printing factory, bathed in diffused Hudson Valley light, holds an atmosphere where time slows down — each artwork not merely installed, but breathing within the architecture. The vast industrial volume redefines the relationship between viewer, material, and void.

In one wing, Gerhard Richter’s grey mirrors dissolve the boundary between reflection and opacity. Their stillness absorbs the daylight, folding the gallery’s gridded windows into painterly illusions. Nearby, Larry Bell’s glass constructions and Robert Irwin’s scrims create corridors of uncertainty, where the viewer becomes both subject and shadow. Walking through them is like inhaling air made visible — each surface a study in the gradations of transparency, color, and self-awareness.

Descending further, the visceral pull of Richard Serra’s torqued ellipses commands bodily engagement. Their curved steel walls — monumental yet tender — demand slowness. Each turn offers a recalibration of weight, balance, and sound; your footsteps become part of the sculpture’s resonance. A parallel intensity exists in Michael Heizer’s voids, massive cuts into the floor that feel like the earth exhaling inside a room. Looking down is both thrilling and unsettling, a reminder of the geological scale that art can inhabit.

Elsewhere, Joseph Beuys’s vitrines, Bruce Nauman’s neon, and John Chamberlain’s crushed metal offer counterpoints — gestures of humor, ritual, and defiance. In another hall, On Kawara’s textual works anchor time as language, while Lawrence Weiner’s wall texts and On Kawara’s banners (seen overhead) reframe the act of reading as a spatial rhythm.

Dia Beacon’s curatorial strength lies in restraint. It allows artworks to exist in long, unhurried conversations with each other — a rare luxury in today’s overstimulated museum culture. The light changes, the shadows migrate, and so does one’s sense of the self within the work.

Leaving the museum, one carries a strange calm — as if the act of seeing had been purified into its essence: space, light, and the quiet endurance of form.

Excellent collection of some big names in contemporary modern sculpture. The space alone is stunning, prime for highlighting Negative Space, and it really is mostly negative space larger pieces, which makes it easy to cover such a large building -former Nabisco factory-. My all time favorite are the Richard Serra pieces: fabulous.