A Letter from Jessica Morgan, Director, Dia Art Foundation
To our Dia community,
Dia stands in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement and with Black artists, colleagues, friends, and others in the Black community. We share the outrage at the systemic racism, inequality, and violence that pervades everyday life in the United States, and around the world, and has become even more exposed during this pandemic.
We mourn the lives lost: George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Jamel Floyd, Tony McDade, Nina Pop, Ahmaud Arbery, and so many, many more.
Protest is a right and has been a vital tool throughout history in the struggle for human rights. We support all who have been making their voices heard.
As an overwhelmingly white organization, both historically and currently, we vow to ensure this is not Dia’s future. We will expand our institution-wide dialogue into the community to hold ourselves accountable to making diversity, equity, access, and inclusion long-term priorities at Dia. These conversations will be driven by voices across the institution and will be a sustained, permanent, and transparent part of our work.
We are committed to considering and answering these questions and more:
How will we make anti-racism a priority in every aspect of the foundation?
How will we provide pathways of opportunity for Black people and for people of color more broadly?
How will we employ collaborative and transparent working culture and practices?
How will we ensure that the work of educating and supporting our white and non-Black POC staff through this process does not fall on our Black colleagues?
How will we share institutional resources with our communities and how will decisions around these allocations be made collectively?
How will we guarantee safe spaces for visitors and staff at all levels?
How will we redress imbalances in our collection and programming?
How will we acknowledge the history of settler colonialism and indigenous oppression at all of our sites, particularly our Land art works, and work toward decolonization?
This work will rise to the top of our agenda: we must be ambitious about embodying the structural change that we want to see in the wider art world. While some concrete actions can and will be taken immediately, such as implementing ongoing bias training, others, such as building deeper community relationships and addressing representation in our collection, program, staff, and board, will take many years to accomplish.
We commit to translating our words into actions and acknowledge that transparency must be a sustained and collaborative effort. In six months, we will share an initial report on the changes we have made in our organization and our progress toward the ongoing long-term work.
Sincerely,
Jessica Morgan
Director, Dia Art Foundation