12 + 2

Dia Art Foundation is pleased to present Duane Linklater: 12 + 2, an exhibition by Duane Linklater with Eagleswitheyesclosed, Gladstone Butler, Fjóla Evans, Miguel Gallego, Rahul Nair, Tanya Lukin Linklater, Sam Aros-Mitchell, Talia Dixon, Jonathan González, Mekko Harjo, Tasha Hubbard, and Layli Long Soldier. With a newly commissioned body of work spanning sculpture, music, poetry, and dance, Linklater and his collaborators radically reimagine the gallery space as a site of Indigenous presence where animal, movement, and memory converge. Culminating five years of collaboration with Dia, Duane Linklater: 12 + 2 marks the artist’s first large-scale commission in the United States. “Duane Linklater brings a powerful and timely intervention into the architecture of Dia Chelsea,” said Jessica Morgan, Dia’s Nathalie de Gunzburg Director. “Engaging with land use, animal-human relations, scale, and Indigenous knowledge systems, his work challenges dominant historical narratives while also expanding on themes central to Dia’s history. It is a privilege to support Duane’s ambitious vision.” For the past decade, Linklater’s work across media has offered a unique perspective on everyday Indigenous resistance, addressing the formal and discursive apparatuses that continue to strip peoples of their sovereignty as well as their ancestral knowledge and practices. Duane Linklater: 12 + 2 unifies and elaborates on the artist’s ongoing concerns and formal vocabulary, redefining notions of site-specificity in conversation with the geology of Dia Chelsea and the related histories of Conceptual art, Land art, and Minimal sculpture. Linklater reconceives Dia Chelsea’s galleries according to the 12 + 2 structure, which is of cosmological significance to the artist’s Omaskêko Cree culture and the number of poles required to build a teepee, here forming the basis for the exhibition’s organization. The 12 + 2 structure is subtly marked on the floor with twelve inlaid earth discs and two boreholes, while a teepee cover hangs from the ceiling trusses. Central to the installation are seven sculptures of buffalo, some reaching 15 feet in length, distributed in the space in various wallowing positions. Tracing these gentle and vigorous actions that have, over centuries, shaped and transformed North American ecosystems, the sculptures provoke an embodied understanding of the animal, considering buffalo up close—its typical behaviors and future rebounding, as well as the weathering of its body as it traverses landscapes. A circular wall sculpture made from a mixture of clay, grass, and soil suggests the physical impression of buffalo’s presence on the land, and a vertical painting maps familial landmarks and buffalo territory that was once coextensive with North America. Integral to the exhibition, a performance series jointly scored by eagleswitheyesclosed (Linklater’s musical project with his son, Tobias Linklater) and choreographer Tanya Lukin Linklater draws on buffalo movement and ideas of transmission and distillation to further express the animal and the most immaterial aspects of the Indigenous cosmology that houses them. The number of performers distills over seven weeks, starting with a trio and a four-dancer ensemble and ending with a percussionist and a solo dancer, so that each performance proposes a variation on the collaboration between the artists toward a multidimensional understanding of buffalo. Performances take place in Dia Chelsea’s galleries each Saturday from September 13 through October 25, 2025, 2–3 pm. “The buffalo emerges here as Linklater’s primary structure to articulate how else art can relate to land and, in turn, to think with buffalo and the enduring effects of its inhabitation of land. In consideration of the practices that Dia has historically supported, Duane Linklater: 12 + 2 produces frictions and poetic overlaps through collaborative formal intelligence both material and immaterial,” said Matilde Guidelli-Guidi, curator and co–department head. The exhibition is accompanied by an extended brochure with contributions by the artist, Guidelli-Guidi, Hubbard, Lukin Linklater, and Long Soldier. Programming includes a lecture by Long Soldier on November 8, and a presentation of Linklater’s film and video work in dialogue with works by other artists in the fall. Duane Linklater: 12 + 2 is curated by Matilde Guidelli-Guidi, curator and co–department head, with Liv Cuniberti, curatorial assistant. Duane Linklater: 12 + 2 is made possible by major support from Claudine and Stephen Bronfman Family Foundation and Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation. Significant support by Berkowitz Contemporary Foundation, Dia’s Director’s Council, Molly Gochman and Michael Armilio, and Salon Art + Design. Generous support by Every Page Foundation and Susan and Larry Marx. Additional support by Canadian Council for American Relations, Catriona Jeffries, Consulate General of Canada in New York, Cowles Charitable Trust, Virginia Cowles Schroth, Hal Jackman Foundation, kurimanzutto, Lillian and Billy Mauer, and Nancy McCain and Bill Morneau. All exhibitions at Dia are made possible by the Economou Exhibition Fund. Duane Linklater (Omaskêko Ininiwak from Moose Cree First Nation) was born in 1976. He received a BA in Native Studies and Fine Arts from the University of Alberta, Edmonton, and an MFA in Film and Video from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. Through sculpture, photography, moving image, installation, and text, he explores the physical and theoretical structures of the museum in relation to current and historical conditions of Indigenous peoples, their objects, and their approaches to materials. Linklater’s collaborative endeavors have included the Wood Land School (2011– ), a shape-shifting project critically engaging with the realms of representation, land, and politics. A mid-career survey of his work, mymothersside, was presented at the Frye Museum, Seattle (2021–22), and traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2023) and the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (2023–24). Recent solo exhibitions were held at Mercer Union, Toronto (2016); Art Gallery of Hamilton, Ontario (2023); and Camden Art Centre, London (2025). His work was featured in international group exhibitions, including Documenta, Kassel, Germany (2012); Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2022); and Bienal de São Paulo (2023); in addition to Artists Space, New York, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (both 2019–20). Dia’s engagement with Linklater began in 2019 with an invitation to take part in the institution’s Artists on Artists Lecture Series, which resulted in the debut performance of his musical project, eagleswitheyesclosed. Linklater lives in North Bay, Robinson Huron Treaty territory.