Rendered view looking north toward the new wet meadow after a big storm. “This will actually be something that you could come to experience in and of itself,” Dia’s director, Jessica Morgan, says of the landscape. Studio Zewde

We are impressed with the new direction that this institution is taking with one of the profession’s rising stars:

In a high-profile commission, Sara Zewde, a landscape architect, is designing eight acres of varied terrain at Dia Beacon that includes meadowlands, wetlands, rolling topography and pathways for visitors. Rafael Rios for The New York Times

Sara Zewde Sows, and Dia Beacon Reaps

On eight acres, a landscape architect challenges ideas about the legacy of the land, the museum’s history and climate change.

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.

“It doesn’t matter what project we’re doing, if it’s a parking lot or a museum landscape — there’s an opportunity to mobilize and provoke,” said Zewde (pronounced ZO-dee), who at 37 is one of a very small number of Black women in the field and is paving the way for others…

Read the whole article here.