Dia Art Foundation is a non-profit arts organisation founded in New York in 1974 by Philippa de Menil, Heiner Friedrich and Helen Winkler to commission, present and preserve ambitious works by a focused group of artists of the 1960s and 1970s. It is known for long-term, site-specific projects such as Walter De Maria’s The Lightning Field and The New York Earth Room, Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty and, since May 2003, Dia Beacon, a museum in a former Nabisco box-printing factory.
Dia played a decisive part in the history of drone. From 1979 to 1985 it funded a continuous Dream House by La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela in a six-storey building on Harrison Street in Lower Manhattan, and in 2015 it acquired a version of the installation, made with Jung Hee Choi and shown at its Chelsea space. Dia also took on the upkeep of Max Neuhaus’s sound work Times Square after its reinstatement in 2002.