Diana Thater in New York

Francis Alys Lawrence Weiner Jason Rhoades Diana Thater Dia’s Big Day Target Practice: Painting Under Attack 1949–78 The State of Things: Brussels/Beijing / Center for Fine Arts Urban Studies

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“Dia’s Lynne Cooke has the subtlest hand as a curator when curating an artist who acts as a curator. Here she has placed Francis Alÿs’s Fabiola collection in a little corner of New York’s Hispanic Society. This is a magnificent venue for this seemingly small and humble show of mostly anonymous paintings. Alÿs initially found, and then sought out, paintings of Saint Fabiola, [a Roman-era female ascetic] whose image was fixed in the minds and hands of novice painters by an 1885 work by French academic painter Jean-Jacques Henner. The context for this show is everything. In the Hispanic Society, you can see Velázquez, Zurbarán, and Murillo; you can also see pottery, textiles and other useful objects made by anonymous hands. The Fabiolas find their place as another type of collection, a repeated object used by those who made or bought them as household icons. I think the Hispanic Society should incorporate this collection into their own.”