When it is introduced this year, the new and varied terrain of Dia Beacon, with its sculptural landforms, meadowlands and pathways, may surprise and delight.
Sara Zewde, the landscape architect who received the high-profile commission in 2021 to reimagine the museum’s eight back acres, says the goal wasn’t just dressing up Dia’s buildings with attractive plants.
She sees her profession as a field “that has the skill set to take ecology, to take culture, to take people and tap into something bigger.”Her conviction that shaping land can illuminate, rather than merely beautify, places and their stories lies at the heart of Studio Zewde, the landscape and urban design firm she founded in Harlem in 2018.
Since then she has taught at Harvard University and is writing a book about her profession’s founding father, Frederick Law Olmsted, linking his vision of urban parks as critical to the future of democracy with his earlier travels through the antebellum South as a journalist and abolitionist.
Persons:
Dia Beacon, Sara Zewde, Frederick Law Olmsted
Organizations:
Harvard University
Locations:
Dia, Harlem