In Conversation: Larry Bell and Charles Gaines with Dia’s Jordan Carter

In celebration of exhibitions for Larry Bell and Charles Gaines at Dia Beacon, please join us for the first-ever discussion between the two artists, moderated by Dia Art Foundation curator, Jordan Carter. 

 A leading figure of Southern California’s Light and Space movement, Larry Bell explores the intersections of light, color, and volume through glass. The Dia Beacon exhibition ‘Larry Bell’ brings together a focused selection of the artist’s early sculptures presented alongside a new diptych conceived for Dia. 

Charles Gaines, a key figure in the development of Conceptual art, has been interrogating the way meaning is constructed through lyrical, system-based works since the 1970s, when he began incorporating the grid as a central formal device in his work. The collection-based survey ‘Charles Gaines’ brings together the artist’s first mathematically determined grid drawings and early experiments with transcribing photographic images into numerical notations, alongside more recent investigations into how image, identity, and language are represented and deconstructed.

This event is free, however, due to limited capacity, reservations and proof of vaccination are required.

Click here to register.

About Larry Bell Larry Bell is one of the most renowned and influential artists to emerge from the Los Angeles art scene of the 1960s, alongside contemporaries Ed Ruscha and Robert Irwin, and had garnered international repute by the age of 30. Known foremost for his refined surface treatment of glass and explorations of light, reflection and shadow through the material, Bell’s significant oeuvre extends from painting and works on paper to glass sculptures and furniture design.Bell’s understanding of the potential of glass and light allows him to expand visual and physical fields of perception, and his sculptures to surpass traditional bounds of the medium. He has said: ‘Although we tend to think of glass as a window, it is a solid liquid that has at once three distinctive qualities: it reflects light, it absorbs light, and it transmits light all at the same time.’ 

About Charles Gaines Gaines lives and works in Los Angeles. He recently retired from the CalArts School of Art, where he was on faculty for over 30 years and established a fellowship to provide critical scholarship support for Black students in the M.F.A. Art program. He has been the subject of numerous exhibitions in the United States and internationally, and his work is in prominent public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York NY, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York NY, the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York NY and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles CA. Gaines’ work was presented at the Venice Biennale in 2007 and 2015. In 2022, Gaines’ new public art project with Creative Time, ‘Moving Chains’, will launch on Governors Island, New York, along with an operatic performance and series of sculptures in Times Square, before travelling to Ohio and Kentucky. An exhibition of his work is currently on long term view at Dia:Beacon in New York. 

About Jordan Carter  Jordan Carter is a curator at Dia Art Foundation, New York, specializing in Fluxus and global Conceptual art of the 1960s and ’70s. Carter joined Dia in 2021 after over four years as Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Art Institute of Chicago, where he curated or co-curated numerous exhibitions, including Mounira Al Solh: I strongly believe in our right to be frivolous (2018); Ellen Gallagher: Are We Obsidian? (2018–19); Benjamin Patterson: When Elephants Fight, It Is the Frogs That Suffer—A Sonic Graffiti (2019); Richard Hunt: Scholar’s Rock or Stone of Hope or Love of Bronze (2020–21); and Ray Johnson c/o (2021–22). From 2015 to 2017, Carter was a curatorial fellow at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis MN. Prior to his time at the Walker, he held curatorial and research positions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York NY; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York NY; and Centre Pompidou, Paris, France. He holds a BA from Brown University and an MA from the Courtauld Institute of Art.