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edgar oliver speaks at the rapture cafe tues 10/23 / oil can press


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Leonard Riggio is the rich person who made Dia:Beacon possible. A demanding, emotional, self-made man — a Brooklyn cabbie’s son who built Barnes & Noble into the dominant bookseller in America — Riggio was the chairman of the Dia board during the years Dia:Beacon was being built. He believed in it with every fiber of his being. When Dia needed a piece of art to round out its permanent collection, he bought it. When cost overruns occurred, he covered them. When design decisions arose that entailed additional expenses, Riggio wrote the check. Of the $50 million it cost to create Dia:Beacon, Riggio gave at least $35 million. The second-biggest donor, the Lannan Foundation, gave $10 million. Ann Tenenbaum, the vice chairman of the board, and her husband Thomas H. Lee, the Wall Street financier, contributed $2.5 million.

But last year, Riggio abruptly, and angrily, resigned as Dia’s chairman. He did so shortly after Dia’s director, a rising star in the museum world named Michael Govan, announced his own departure, for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Lacma). It was Govan who found the Nabisco building and envisioned what it might one day be. And to be blunt, it was Govan who found Riggio to pay for it. Govan is the one who brought Riggio on the board, who whispered in his ear about which pieces of art to buy for the new museum, who consulted with Riggio every day about the cost overruns and the design changes and the million other decisions, large and small, that arose in the five years the two men were building Dia:Beacon. When I interviewed Riggio not long ago, he told me that he viewed himself and Govan as partners in building Dia:Beacon. “We were very close,” he said. After Govan left for Los Angeles, Riggio seethed.

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13 OCTOBER, 7PM: PERFORMANCE D

Artist Dan Graham, whose work was exhibited in Environmental Aesthetic at Storefront in 1986, in conversation with architectural historian and theorist Beatriz Colomina. Graham will show and discuss his most recent photographic work, a contemporary revisitation of his photographic documentation of New Jersey in the late Sixties.
DG interview
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