Walter De Maria: 360˚ I Ching

From the moment he moved to New York from California in 1960, Walter De Maria began making work that foreshadowed much of the Minimal, Conceptual, and Land art movements of the following decade. His early experiments with wooden boxes that invite the viewer’s interaction and his quasi-invisible drawings evolved, by 1965, into polished-metal sculptures of high precision. In 1968, contending for the first time with earth as material and concept, De Maria filled an art gallery with dirt and drew two one-mile-long lines onto the dry salt lakes of California’s Mojave Desert, respectively. At the turn of the 1970s and with the support of Dia, the artist began distributing his metal works horizontally and organizing them according to units and increments that grew laterally to room-size and, eventually, environmental-scale works. This exhibition presents 360˚ I Ching / 64 Sculptures (1981) from Dia’s collection, for which the artist arranged 576 white-lacquered rods into 64 groups in patterns determined by the hexagrams of I Ching, the ancient Chinese book of divination and a popular resource for artists interested in chance operations and aleatory compositional arrangements.

Walter De Maria: 360˚ I Ching is organized by Matilde Guidelli-Guidi, curator and co–department head, with Ella den Elzen, curatorial assistant.

Walter De Maria was born in Albany, California, in 1935, and studied history and art at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1960 he moved to New York, where he lived and worked until the end of his life. De Maria’s early work of the 1960s included music, performance, and writing as well as sculptural and conceptual works. With Robert Whitman in 1963, De Maria founded a gallery at 9 Great Jones Street in New York and exhibited his sculptures there later that year. He also performed as a jazz percussionist with other musicians and joined the band the Primitives, which later evolved into the Velvet Underground. After his first solo gallery exhibition in 1965, De Maria’s work was included in the 1966 Primary Structures exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York. He began to create work outside the traditional gallery space, presenting his Mile Long Drawing in 1968 in California’s Mojave Desert. Beginning in the mid-1970s, Dia commissioned some of the artist’s most significant site-specific works, including The Lightning Field (1977) in western New Mexico, and The New York Earth Room (1977) and The Broken Kilometer (1979) in New York. Dia continues to maintain these long-term installations as well as De Maria’s The Vertical Earth Kilometer (1977) in Kassel, Germany, which is the companion piece to The Broken Kilometer. De Maria died in 2013.