Oops! I Dia Again

Dia hires Philippe Vergne, chief curator at the Walker Art Center, as its director, less than one year after the organization hired Jeffrey Weiss, who resigned. [Read an interview with Weiss here.] Weiss left after nine months, saying that he felt he didn't have the time to focus on curatorial and scholarly work. If there's a lesson there, it didn't take at Dia, who tapped another prominent curator for its directorship.

Vergne specifically comes as a surprise appointment for Dia, though his departure from the Walker is no surprise. By all accounts Vergne was going to follow Kathy Halbreich to MoMA—so he may well be foregoing a very prominent research position for a more administrative role.

In any case, Vergne's our man at Dia. My question for Vergne remains the same as my question for Weiss: Is moving back to the Chelsea space out of the question? Why not, with the High Line space gone? And is finding a new New York space still the board's priority?

UPDATE: Note that Paul Schmelzer broke the news. Schmelzer writes, "Vergne, who co-curated the '06 Whitney Biennial, has been a driving force behind some of the more interesting Walker shows during his 10 years in Minneapolis, from the recent Huang Yong Ping retrospective to his three-artist Heart of Darkness show (which featured Thomas Hirschhorn's haunting Cavemanman) to 'How Latitudes Become Forms: Art in a Global Age,' a curatorial group effort that benefited mightily from his vision."