Aruna D’Souza
Space, place, and mapping: the artist explores themes of imperialism and colonialism in a new show at Dia Beacon.
Renée Green: The Equator Has Moved, installation view. Courtesy Dia Art Foundation. Photo: Bill Jacobson Studio. © Renée Green and Free Agent Media.
Renée Green: The Equator Has Moved, curated by Jordan Carter with Ella den Elzen, Dia Beacon, 3 Beekman Street, Beacon, New York,
through August 31, 2026
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When Renée Green began showing her work in the early 1990s in New York, she was tagged as part of a new wave of artists involved in institutional critique, alongside people like Andrea Fraser, Mark Dion, and Fred Wilson. This framing was perhaps inevitable, given her engagement with the construction and re-presentation of archives in works like Import-Export Funk Office (1992–93), arguably her most famous project, and her participation in the Whitney Independent Study Program, where she was taught by Hans Haacke and other practitioners of institutional critique’s first generation. But it was also somewhat unhelpful: her work was certainly not focused on the narrow concern of laying bare the “voice of administrative power” that museums or other entities wield, as she wrote in 2006. She was tackling much larger questions of language, subjectivity, and the construction of knowledge, a project she shares with Lorna Simpson, Lorraine O’Grady, Glenn Ligon, and Adrian Piper. And Green wasn’t doing critique so much as research, taking up the role of anthropologist or ethnographer—asking questions about how the world is organized and encouraging us to join in her search for answers.
Renée Green: The Equator Has Moved, installation view. Courtesy Dia Art Foundation. Photo: Bill Jacobson Studio. © Renée Green and Free Agent Media.
Though widely shown in Europe and global biennials, Green is only now receiving a major solo museum exhibition in New York. Its title, The Equator Has Moved, signals many of its themes: space, place, and, above all, mapping—and the way all three are functions of power, including tectonic shifts of colonial domination and empire-building. (If Trump can rename the Gulf of Mexico, why can’t the equator move?) Curated by Jordan Carter with Ella den Elzen, Equator spans two massive galleries at the heart of Dia Beacon and a long passage running perpendicular to them. Featuring twenty-four pieces, many of which comprise multiple parts—installation, banners, a mural, time-based work, and so on—it feels very big indeed. (There are around six hours of digital film and sound work alone.) This is not a viewing experience for the completist; rather, its pleasures are akin to going down the rabbit holes you stumble upon in an archive and seeing where each new discovery leads you.
Renée Green: The Equator Has Moved, installation view. Courtesy Dia Art Foundation. Photo: Bill Jacobson Studio. © Renée Green and Free Agent Media. Pictured, center left foreground: Peak, 1991.
A pair of installations—Peak and Pigskin Library—are on view for the first time in the United States since their debut at Pat Hearn Gallery in 1991. Both center questions of exploration. Peak involves a makeshift structure—tall, white plywood walls connected by two-by-fours. An Ansel Adams photograph of mountains and a blue pennant are affixed atop one; an uptilted telescope and tripod-mounted binoculars sit on the floor nearby, as does a step stool with climbing ropes tying it loosely to the construction. A trail of boot prints climbs the white panel leading up to the photo. The idea of conquest, and even violence, has always been baked into mountain climbing—a 1922 English account of an expedition was titled “The Assault on Mount Everest”—but here Green aligns that zeal with the medium of photography, specifically landscape photography: the flag reads Olympus, the name of a real mountain, a mythological home of the gods, and a Japanese camera company, melding fact, fiction, and the technologies of representation.
Renée Green: The Equator Has Moved, installation view. Courtesy Dia Art Foundation. Photo: Bill Jacobson Studio. © Renée Green and Free Agent Media. Pictured: Pigskin Library, 1991.
If photography is one of the ways colonial power is deployed, so are other means of recording and categorizing. Pigskin Library is a reconstruction of the collection of fifty-nine books Teddy Roosevelt took with him on his 1909–10 expedition to East Africa, Congo, and Sudan to collect samples for the Smithsonian Institution. It is a simple affair—a cloth tent, a table supporting a chest containing “replicas” of Roosevelt’s books (including Paradise Lost and Tales of the Argonauts), and the sounds of John Philip Sousa’s “The Corcoran Cadets.” At the foot of the table is a framed sign with a passage from Roosevelt’s African Game Trails, in which he explains why he had the tomes bound in durable pigskin: “Often my reading would be done while resting under a tree at noon, perhaps beside the carcass of a beast I had killed . . .” The words underscore the connection between scientific investigation and bloodthirst—Roosevelt and his companions slaughtered or trapped over eleven thousand animals during their trip. Outside the tent are two long wooden file boxes filled with color-coded wood placards, each printed with a term culled from the index of African Game Trails; one box contains the Latin names for the small and large mammals Roosevelt discovered, while the other contains phrases organized by rubrics including “hexing,” “comfort,” “luck,” and “passion”—squishy concepts that throw the scientific nature of the mission into question. Most importantly, a small camp stool and a set of white cotton gloves—the kind used by archival researchers—are available for viewers who wish to explore the files, turning them from passive spectators to users of the work.
Renée Green, Color III, 1990. Courtesy Dia Art Foundation. Photo: Bill Jacobson Studio. © Renée Green and Free Agent Media.
One of the major themes running through the show is color. It is literally present in the galleries, in the eleven brightly-hued Bichos (modular media-viewing booths named after Lygia Clark’s manipulable sculptures) that run down the centers of each space; the riotously dyed Space Poems (banners printed with fragments of text, both Green’s own words and those of others) that hang from the ceiling and on the walls; and the vinyl lettering of Elsewhere? [Wall version] (2002/25), a mural composed of names of imaginary places, listed in alphabetical order. But color is also present as a concept—a tool for making the world knowable and graspable, an act that Green’s work suggests is inevitably ideological. The exhibition reassembles her 1990 Color series, which might be best understood as mixed-media diagrams, like something out of a science fair: “neutral” gray-painted panels bearing a labeled array of color swatches and framed vellum passages of text. In Color I, excerpts from two novels that demonstrate the racism of their characters—Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted (1892), the first known novel by an African American woman, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925)—flank paint samples with quixotic names like “Mexican Orange,” “Inca Gold,” “Haiku,” and “Jamaican Dream.”
Renée Green: The Equator Has Moved, installation view. Courtesy Dia Art Foundation. Photo: Bill Jacobson Studio. © Renée Green and Free Agent Media. Pictured: Neutral/Natural, 1990.
The selection of works is designed to underline Green’s long-standing engagement with many of the artists in Dia’s collection: Elsewhere? is painted on a wall that previously held a text piece by Lawrence Weiner, the Space Poems include language from Sol LeWitt, and among the films shown in the Bichos are Partially Buried (1996) and Partially Buried Continued (1997), which demonstrate the impossibility of reconstructing a single narrative about Robert Smithson’s earthwork on the Kent State campus, and how it became inextricably linked to the state’s violence against student protesters. But consider Which? (1990)—a panel painted black and white imprinted with pairs of opposing terms (top/bottom, other/same, passive, active, he/she). Small shelves running down the center support half-filled fishbowls etched with the words “ambiguous,” “shifting,” and “indeterminate”—a material assertion of a “gray area.” Then there is Neutral/Natural (1990), a more complex arrangement that presents gray (in this case, painted panels) as the neutrality that counters the “naturalness” of Angela Davis’s Afro, a specimen jar filled with tree bark, an image of a waterfall, and words representing various branches of Enlightenment knowledge. It is impossible not to think of Simpson’s and O’Grady’s insistent complication of the binaries that structure Western thought here. Neither artist is part of Dia’s collection, nor is Piper, who haunts Import-Export Funk Office (present in this show via the liner notes to a CD Green produced in 2011). Ligon, whose text-based paintings are echoed in Green’s strategies of quotation, is, but only via a single digital work on Dia’s website. Perhaps this is one of the achievements of the show: demonstrating not only the way Green’s art inflects what the museum has, but also pointing out what is lamentably missing.
Aruna D’Souza is a writer and critic based in New York. She contributes to the New York Times and 4Columns. Her new book, Imperfect Solidarities, was published by Floating Opera Press last summer.