Leonard Riggio, the longtime executive chairman of Barnes & Noble, built a collection rich in works by blue-chip artists, among them Pablo Picasso, Willem de Kooning, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Donald Judd, and Walter De Maria. Within the art world, he was best known for his association with the Dia Art Foundation, of which he was chairman from 1998 to 2006 and helped realize its acclaimed outpost in Beacon, New York. Riggio departed the institution on somewhat acrimonious terms, but a decade later, he started to rebuild his relationship with the foundation at the invitation of director Jessica Morgan. Morgan speaks about returning Riggio to Dia’s firmament.
When I first started at Dia in 2015, my feeling was very much that all the people who had been so significant in bringing the institution into being at various points should be in our orbit. Around my first week working here, I got in touch with Len, telling him, “it’s very important to me that everybody feels welcome here.” Then we started seeing each other very regularly, and there was a certain amount of getting over the hump of the past. But I told him, “As far as I’m concerned, there’d be no Dia:Beacon without you.” We just really hit it off. It was so important to me to bring him back into the Dia fold, and I’m so happy to say that that happened over the years.
He was completely self-educated around art, and yet he had this deep, passionate knowledge and intentional learning, particularly in relation to Dia’s artists. He was so generous in sharing and so passionate in wanting to explain the high-concept artworks [in his collection], whether it be Arte Povera or Walter De Maria. There’s no way he was reaching for the easy work. His passion for art, I think, came from appreciation of everything that it brought him in life, from ideas and concepts to materiality and process to beauty and culture. He had an immense curiosity.
Len always talked about this seismic moment of encountering Richard Serra’s Torqued Ellipses [1996–97] in Chelsea. He always told me that seeing that work opened his eyes to a very different type of art from the kind he had been collecting, which, at that time, had been more 19th-century and early 20th-century art. His pathway to becoming much more deeply involved with the artists of the ’60s and ’70s generation—and then his involvement with Dia—came when he asked Michael Govan, who was then Dia director, “what’s going to happen to these works?” And Michael said, “Well, I don’t know.” And Len said, “How can it be that you’re not going to keep this forever? This is so important.”
As the story goes, Dia:Beacon came from that conversation and Len’s realization that Dia had no physical place where these works could be maintained. He paid tens of millions of dollars for the renovation. On top of that, he also acquired and gifted extraordinary bodies of work by Serra, Dan Flavin, Agnes Martin, Robert Smithson—seismic contributions to the institution. Truly, Dia would not look the way that it does now, were it not for him. Len became very committed to the idea that artworks of our time should have this relationship to temporality—that there should be this idea of permanence and this commitment to supporting artists in that way.
