Rita McBride - Momentum

Rita McBride - Momentum
October 13–15, 2023

Since the mid-1980s, Rita McBride has developed a conceptual, cross-disciplinary, intermedia, and feminist approach to art making that holds collaboration at its center. This exhibition centers on the artist’s long-standing interest in architecture, design, and sculpture as they relate to the public sphere in forms such as seating structures, movement-guiding systems, and commercial awnings. At the core of Rita McBride: Arena Momentum, on view at Dia Beacon, is Arena (1997), a lightweight, modular structure in the form of a tribune that is activated by the presence of audiences and performers alike. Alongside Arena are freestanding and wall-mounted artworks from the last two decades that reflect McBride’s longstanding interest in how public infrastructures shape ways of looking.

Arena becomes an arena when animated by people in an ongoing and open process that is punctuated by choreographed engagements. For the duration of the presentation at Dia Beacon, an expanding body of artists, performers, writers, musicians, and dancers will activate physical and virtual spaces as part of a series of engagements with Arena. The series, collectively called Momentum, is initiated by McBride with experimental performance collective discoteca flaming star (founded by Cristina Gomez Barrio and Wolfgang Mayer) and choreographer Alexandra Waierstall.

Momentum is live at Dia Beacon, October 13–15, 2023.

Rita McBride: Arena Momentum is organized by Alexis Lowry, curator, with Emily Markert, curatorial assistant.

All exhibitions at Dia are made possible by the Economou Exhibition Fund.  

Rita McBride: Arena Momentum is made possible by major support from Brenda R. Potter. Significant support provided by Erika Glazer, and additional support by a Board Discretionary Grant of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, and Graham Steele and Ulysses de Santi.

Rita McBride was born in Des Moines in 1960. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles and Düsseldorf.