This event celebrates the DMA’s recent acquisition of a work by iconic artist Walter De Maria. Gavin Delahunty, Hoffman Family Senior Curator of Contemporary Art, will address De Maria’s art, and award-winning author Geoff Dyer will share insights about his pilgrimage to De Maria’s The Lightning Field in New Mexico, as well as his musings on travel, landscape, and the power of art in his newest book, White Sands: Experiences from the Outside World.
Dyer takes us along on his adventures, ranging from the Forbidden City in Beijing to Tahiti, where he sought out Gauguin’s notion of paradise. Kirkus raved, “There is an undeniable joy throughout Dyer’s writing, an affirmation that travel and the experience of place—not merely being someplace, but being present in it—is a gateway to the humanity of past, present, and future." Geoff Dyer has received a Lannan Literary Fellowship and a National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. The author of four novels and nine works of nonfiction, Dyer is writer-in-residence at the University of Southern California. The New Yorker calls him “a restless polymath and an irresistibly funny storyteller.”
Before the event: View the installation Walter De Maria: Counterpoint between 5:00 and 6:45 p.m., and then take your seat by 7:00 p.m. At 7:10 p.m., listen to a performance by percussionist Stockton Helbing of one of De Maria’s rare musical compositions.
After the event: On January 21 at 2:00 p.m., join us for a free screening of Troublemakers: The Story of Land Art. The documentary features interviews with notable American artists of the time and highlights the work of Robert Smithson, Walter De Maria, and Michael Heizer. No reservations necessary.