'The New York Earth Room' (1977). (Courtesy John Cliett/©Dia Art Foundation)

The start of the art season is certainly exciting. Hundreds of galleries are opening new shows around town. Friends, colleagues, enemies are catching up, reuniting in this great city. But just as exciting is news that the Dia Art Foundation's two glorious long-term Walter De Maria exhibitions in Soho, The New York Earth Room (1977) and The Broken Kilometer (1979), are back on view after a summer break. (The foundation does some maintenance of the soil in the Earth Room during those months, as we reported back in June.) They opened up to the public today. They're free. They're glorious—perfect respites from the bustle of Soho.

More information is available over at Dia's website.

Walter De Maria, "The New York Earth Room," 1977. (Photo: John Cliett. Copyright Dia Art Foundation)

The New York Earth Room, the long-running installation in a SoHo loft by artist Walter De Maria cared for by the Dia Art Foundation, will be closing for its annual summer break on June 10—that's tomorrow.

The installation, which is composed of 250 cubic yards of earth, takes up 3,600 square feet of floor space and weighs 280,000 pounds, opened to the public in its current home on Wooster Street in Soho in 1980, the third version of Mr. De Maria's work. The first opened in Munich, Germany, in 1968, and the second in 1974 at the Hessisches Landesmuseum in Darmstadt, Germany. The first two no longer exist.

What happens to the earth when the doors close? Not much beyond its normal care to make sure the work can live on, the oversight of which is handled by Bill Dilworth, The New York Earth Room's longtime caretaker. "They turn the earth and till it," said Melissa Parsoff, director of communications at Dia. It's also known to get pretty humid in there since there's no air-conditioning so consider yourself saved from untold bad hair days this summer.

Nonetheless, if you plan on checking it out tomorrow, The New York Earth Room will be open from 12 p.m. to 6 p.m. (though it closes for a staff break from 3 to 3:30 p.m.). If you miss out, no worries. It opens again on Sept. 12.

"The Lightning Field." (Courtesy Dia)

And in another item from Carol Vogel's Inside Art column in The New York Times: the Dia Foundation has just begun a campaign to repair and better conserve Walter De Maria’s The Lightning Field, originally commissioned by that organization and completed in 1977.

The plan calls for some $400,000 in fund-raising, with Miuccia Prada and Larry Gagosian leading the effort. From the story:

“It’s like a 21st-century Mount Rushmore,” he said in a telephone interview. “Mount Rushmore is like some kind of church, but ‘The Lightning Field’ is more ecumenical, more global.” Mr. Gagosian, knowing Ms. Prada admired Mr. De Maria’s work, called her to see if she would join forces with him.

Restoration should be completed by this time next year.