Reese Lewis writes for the Brooklyn Rail about Cameron Rowland’s commission and exhibition at Dia, including Plot, a one-acre section of Dia Beacon’s site on which Rowland and their company, Plot, Inc., have placed a burial ground easement, under the assumption that it contains the unmarked graves of formerly enslaved residents on the land.
Surrounded by Dia’s landed property, Plot feels like it is floating arbitrarily in space with no real constraints other than the conceptual desire to be sized at the singular unit of one acre. In all of the text, Rowland does not suggest that we go up digging burial grounds or claim this site to be a discovery. Rather, this site is ultimately a universal model that suggests if one parcel of land is capable of being an unmarked slave burial, any site in the US is capable of being one.
Rowland also produced Estate (2024), a publication detailing Dia’s own real estate holdings, which include the thousands of acres it acquired and placed restrictions on to protect the vistas of Walter de Maria’s Lightning Field. Any site in the US is capable of being subject to such easements, but Dia feels exceptional in its institutional position as a custodian of the real estate of art.
Cameron Rowland: Properties [brooklynrail.org]
Cameron Rowland Properties is at Dia:Beacon thru October 2025* [diaart.org]
Previously, related: One Acre and Dia Mule
*As if planning for such things a year from now is normal.
** “That things just go on is the ‘catastrophe’.” -Walter Benjamin