Behind the Scenes with Daniel Oates-Kuhn, Assistant Manager of Visitor Services
In our second rendition of Dia Art Foundation employee interviews, Daniel Oates-Kuhn, assistant manager of visitor services, reflects on his experience both inside and around Dia Beacon. Growing up in the Hudson Valley, Oates-Kuhn cultivated a lifelong appreciation and engagement with the area, which he brings forth into his role at Dia. Here, he discusses the decade he’s spent as a Dia employee, the changes and progress he has witnessed, and the important role of the visitor services department within the institution.
Photo: Daniel Oates-Kuhn
You grew up in the Hudson Valley, where Dia Beacon is located. What aspects of the area are you most drawn to?
I was raised in a predominantly rural setting within the Hudson Valley, and as a result I spent most of my childhood traipsing through the woods, discovering salamanders, collecting rocks, and building forts. A lifestyle augmented by the near-psychedelic levels of imagination latent to my child brain.
For the most part my priorities haven’t changed much, and sneaking around industrial ruins, collecting real and or imagined relics, foraging for wild edibles, and constructing temporary shelters remain significant ways of connecting with my surroundings. I suppose I’ve partially replaced the aforementioned levels of imagination with research into the area’s ancient geologic history, the stories and mythologies of the people and societies who have inhabited this land, as well as its industrialization and consequent decline.
Photo: Daniel Oates-Kuhn
What was the arts and culture scene like in the Hudson Valley prior to Dia Beacon’s opening in 2003?
When I graduated from high school two years earlier, my arts and cultural focus was centered around graffiti and hardcore punk shows in unfinished basements—and fortunately there was no shortage of these types of events in this area due to its proximity to New York City. But these interests felt incongruous with the romanticized landscapes of the Hudson River school and those inspired by them, or the hippy folk art of those who had attended and still live vicariously through Woodstock. Back then, apart from places like Storm King Art Center and student art shows held at the various universities throughout the region, my experiences with non-representational art took place in dense and geometrically inclined cityscapes.
Photo: Daniel Oates-Kuhn
What was Dia Beacon like when it first opened? Do any of your early experiences in the space stand out?
It’s challenging to look back on my first visits without projecting onto them the familiarity I have with the space now. I remember it feeling bigger, in the way that an unknown place always feels bigger than one you have visited before. During the many years working there, I’ve developed a closeness to the facility (a former Nabisco box- and label-printing factory) that is unlike my relationship to any other place. The building’s architectural orientation, based on the path of the sun, has ingrained itself in my sense of directional movement and awareness of time. I know when to expect certain trees to bloom and what time of the year the light casts certain shadows.
The walls, floors, columns, and window frames—the structural elements of the building—are my first memories of the space. I remember feeling that I could absorb and vividly experience the building’s past, its workers, the reams of cardboard, the cacophony of machines, while I walked across the floors dotted with oil stains, scrape marks, and mechanical wear patterns. I felt the energy of hectically moving bodies and the banality of labor when I read the various messages and doodles scrawled by employees on attic walls.
Photo: Daniel Oates-Kuhn
Can you discuss the role of the visitor services department at Dia Beacon and its vital role in producing each visitor’s experience?
On paper, the visitor services department is responsible for admitting the public into the museum, selling tickets, informing visitors of policies, and keeping both the members of the public and the artworks safe and accessible. However, at institutions which show more immersive, interactive, and performance-based exhibitions such as ours, the team’s role stretches beyond the transactional and into engagement and education.
Visitor services, and more specifically the gallery attendant team—who visitors will see throughout the museum wearing all black and communicating via walkie-talkie—operate at an important intersection between the public, the artwork, and the museum administration. Situated in the galleries, we field questions, comments, and exchange ideas with visitors, spending numerous hours in the space looking at the works and observing the way other people are look at them. This exposure to and mediation of a wide spectrum of responses, interpretations, and reactions provides the team with an extensive, and most importantly, practical intelligence for communicating the abstract and sometimes philosophically challenging concepts inherent to the works on view at Dia Beacon. We are committed to providing for the public not only physical access to the work but also a non-hierarchical space for accessing and exchanging the ideas present.
Since your 2011 arrival to the department how has Dia Beacon and the visitor services department evolved?
Throughout its history, the foundation has functioned more like a living organism than a repository for historical objects. However, the collection’s ability to reflect that dynamism seemed to diminish after Dia Beacon opened: works on view rarely changed and were rooted in a past art historical period. Recent programming feels like a conversation between our past, present, and future, and is more engaged with living artists with more diverse practices. I think the recent accelerated pace of acquisitions and commissions has positively impacted visitor services by making our work feel more urgent. I see the team as facilitators of meaningful ideas and experiences, a sense made more immediate and necessary by the display of groundbreaking and genre-defying projects like those by Carl Craig, Joëlle Tuerlinckx, and Isabel Lewis.
Personally, my priority has always been to ensure visitor services works closely with the curatorial and learning and engagement departments, relationships which provide greater awareness of, and enthusiasm for the collection amongst the staff, while also offering insight into the public response for work done by other departments. The most rewarding aspect of my role is enabling non-traditional forms of learning and exchange both internally through staff training, and externally when engaging with visitors. The gallery attendant team at Dia Beacon has a meaningful role to play as educators through their countless hours of exposure and kinship with the art objects, but also from their time as intermediaries between the public and the ideas of the artists, the ideology of the institution, and the decisions of its curators.
Photo: Daniel Oates-Kuhn
How has the area around Beacon changed since you were a kid and what has Dia Beacon’s role been in that shift?
Dia’s reappropriation of the Nabisco factory in 2003 unquestionably reshaped the Hudson Valley, which went from being a rusting postindustrial center in the late twentieth century to the service-based tourist economy we find ourselves in now. Dia Beacon ushered in a new era of repurposing the area’s architecture, which in turn has reinvigorated the local economy. While these impacts are felt in largely positive ways it's also important to be aware of and work to mitigate their adverse effects, as well to hear from those who have seen the other side of these changes—including mass layoffs in the manufacturing sector, high-end boutiques replacing essential local businesses, and unsustainable cost-of-living increases.
Dia Beacon’s presence has provided the area with yet another source of intrigue and mythology through the individual experiences it facilitates. But along with those successes we have a responsibility to engage with the community and play an active role in providing its residents with not only passive entertainment but also a sense of investment, participation, and engagement.
