Behind the Scenes with Mina Barden, Gale Griffiths, and Qasi Skalky, Gallery Attendants, Dia Beacon
In this Dia Art Foundation staff interview, three of Dia Beacon’s gallery attendants, Mina Barden, Gale Griffiths, and Qasi Skalky, share an inside look at what it’s like to work in the galleries of Dia Beacon.
Photo: Qasi Skalky
How long have you been a gallery attendant at Dia?
MB: Six years.
GG: My most recent stint at Dia has been four years and five months.
QS: Two+ years.
What spurred your interest in the job?
MB: I first heard of Dia Art Foundation through an arts television show a short time before Dia Beacon opened. Once it opened, it became one of my first introductions to modern contemporary art. I would eventually become more rounded in my experiences through the years and viewed Dia as a base camp for my early exploration. When a good friend of mine told me that Dia was hiring new gallery attendants, it felt natural for me to apply.
GG: I am a painter whose life has been devoted to art and the study of art. Museums have always been one of my favorite haunts. When a friend told me that she had seen an ad for job openings at a new museum in Beacon, I jumped on it.
QS: I’ve always wanted to work in the arts and what better way to work in the arts than to be paid to be around it?
What is your favorite part of the job?
MB: I enjoy talking to the visitors at Dia Beacon. Everyone has their own perspective and unique point of view about the exhibitions. I find it fascinating that you can have a conversation with someone who’s never been to a contemporary art center, a person that works at a museum, and another individual who has a personal connection to an artist in the same day. My interactions with people always reignite new personal conversations with the artwork and I really enjoy that.
GG: I enjoy talking to the visitors most, especially the ones who are skeptical that what they are looking at qualifies as art. But also, visitors who have questions about the collection and the building.
QS: It’s hard to say. Maybe it’s a tie between getting to “live” with the art and talking to visitors about it, especially when they are very frustrated or lost, as I love helping people find new ways in which they can appreciate the art.
Photo: Mina Barden
Do you have a personal artistic practice? If so, can you tell us a bit about it?
MB: My personal draw to visual art was through my early practice of experimental music and composition. I still feel that working with sound is my main channel of expression, though my interests have expanded to include everything from art installations to pop music. My latest obsession has been rediscovering techno. Hearing how techno has matured and how younger producers and DJs are drawing from its history is interesting. In the last few months of the pandemic, I’ve been DJing at home and doing remixes for other recording artists.
GG: I am most interested in representational art. I love to draw and paint. My drawings and paintings are representations of the physical world from life and photos. I prefer working from life, but sometimes I see a photo that I want to draw or paint from. Most of my training came from copying the old masters, a practice that I continue to this day. But the best part of art school was having the models and the ideas from other artists who inspired me in my work.
QS: Yes. While my background is in film, the past six or so years have been about wanting to try every type of medium that I can get my hands on. I opened a jar of pickled peppers once and the cap told me that the best conversations start over good food. That’s probably true, I told the cap, but I think more than anything my favorite conversations start over bad art. At the end of the day, the medium doesn’t matter as long as a mess has been made.
The nature of your role provides extended time in the various galleries. Do you think that this time with the artwork influences you?
MB: Well . . . yes, I do feel that the extended time with the art and architecture has influenced me. Maybe in subtle ways—how I arrange a cheese plate or my sensitivity to natural light in an enclosed space.
GG: I often feel inspired to draw the art, especially John Chamberlain’s car sculptures and Charlotte Posenenske’s modules.
QS: Definitely. Being around art all the time is both beautiful and maddening. The beautiful aspect is boring. If you like the art at all, then I don’t need to explain. The maddening thing is that I am surrounded by all this inspiring art and I can’t do anything about it. A pipe dream: Imagine how awesome it would be to make art inside of Bruce Nauman’s Mapping the Studio I (Fat Chance John Cage) (2001).
Gale Griffiths in front of the Philadelphia Museum of Art as a young girl. Photo: Gale Griffiths
What is your favorite thing about the building or the collection that you’ve noticed from being in the space over time?
MB: The building can support different life experiences. You may find yourself having personal challenges or moments of complete contentment. For whatever reason, I have found that clarifying and processing different emotions can happen inside the galleries.
GG: The fact that the artists and architects were able to maintain the industrial quality of the factory in their adaptation to a museum space. Most of the artworks collected there are made from materials that you would find in a commercial factory by artists with a Minimalist or Conceptual intent.
QS: It’s hard for me to describe the beauty and comfort of negative space and the impact of natural lighting. As I sit and write this, I am crowded by junk and overbearing yellow light. I cannot help but think of what it feels like to breathe in the middle of Mel Bochner’s Measurement Room: No Vantage Point (1969/2019) or just exist in the On Kawara gallery.
Mina Barden performing during a Thursday Session at Dia Beacon. Photo: Daniel Oates-Kuhn
What exhibition has stuck with you the most?
MB: Louise Lawler’s Birdcalls (1972/1981) is brilliant in its placement within the west garden of Dia Beacon. Carl Craig’s Party/After Party (2020) feels like an important historical work. Robert Ryman’s exploration of paint and how it’s applied—it’s behavior on different surfaces that sometimes moves into three-dimensional space—is also wonderful. The exhibition that has stuck with me overtime and that I keep coming back to is Imi Knoebel’s Raum 19 (Room 19, 1968). After entering the building, head to the back of Dia’s first floor, sweep around toward the southside of Robert Smithson’s gallery and then bam! Questions arise. A few of them that I had when I first encountered the work: Am I allowed to be back here? This is definitely the artwork, right? Did the artist just step out for a cigarette and will be back in a moment? Learning that the work’s size is linked to the dimensions of the room it is enclosed in alludes to the notion that Room 19 could exist in completion just about anywhere. Inside of a freight elevator or a Superdome. If you had a room the size of planet Earth and arranged the elements of the work as you saw fit, Room 19 would be the size of a planet! This nature of the work I find very entertaining.
GG: Charlotte Posenenske’s modules, Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings, and Robert Irwin’s Excursus: Homage to the Square³ (1998/2015).
QS: Walter De Maria’s 360° I Ching/64 Sculptures (1981). About a year before I started at Dia, an artist friend shared with me some ideas he had been working on based on this text that he loved and grew up with, which was called the I Ching. He wanted to adapt it into a more personal and contemporary context for his own art. A year later I came to work at Dia and the first piece that I saw was De Maria’s 360° I Ching/64 Sculptures. For what it’s worth, it felt like a sign. I will always remember it.