Modes of Expedition: Renée Green’s Textual Cartographies

Flown to celebrate, honor, and memorialize, flags carry the weight of stories that came before. For Renée Green, they interweave disparate artistic legacies in orchestral arrangements. At Dia Beacon, Green’s vibrant banners draw the gaze upward with dye-sublimation printed fabrics spanning the rafters. Rendered in canary, magenta, indigo, and mustard, the panels host fragments of poetic text—both their positioning and the language on them making use of voided space. As visitors meander below, they gather prose as mementoes of their own travel. A sequence reads, “Constellations Of People And Places / Journeys / Span / Crossings / Bifurcations / Welcoming Capacious Not-Knowing / And Acceptance.”

This work, Space Poem #13 (Us Together) (2025), is on view in Green’s first major New York institutional exhibition, “The Equator Has Moved,” which presents work from over thirty-five years of her career. The Space Poems series (2007–ongoing) emerges from her process of excerpting and reassembling language from literature, artists’ musings, and her own writing. Since their first showing in 2007 as a part of the “United Space of Conditioned Becoming” exhibition at Participant Inc. in New York, these works have become a benchmark of Green’s practice. They have buttressed institutional corridors from Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne to the foyer of the 2022 Whitney Biennial.

Made following Green’s 2024 visit to the Northern Utah earthworks in Dia’s collection, Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels (1973–76) and Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970), this iteration—thirty individual banners—demarcates a responsive exercise in environmental and archival immersion. Green critically reframes and challenges the geospatial legacy of the Land Art movement while her strategic color blocking recollects the avant-garde color play of 1960s and ’70s conceptual art. In turn, she synergizes with Dia’s long-standing institutional focus on canonical artists working in these genres, contending with “site” not simply as a locale, but also a nonlinear passage of time. Throughout her career, the multihyphenate practitioner has traversed writing, painting, installation, video, and sound. Green reads closely and annotates meticulously to map paths through formal and social history.

Green began collecting traces of visual culture in the museums of her hometown, Cleveland, Ohio. She went on to study at Wesleyan University, where she reckoned with W. E. B. Du Bois and Alain Locke’s frameworks for Black artists and penned her first published writing for the exhibition catalogue No Title: The Collection of Sol LeWitt (1981). Green spoke on the formation of her personal library in our conversation following the opening of “The Equator Has Moved.” Fondly recalling being gifted copies of an Eva Hesse monograph written by Lucy R. Lippard (1976) and The Collected Writings of Robert Smithson (1979), designed by LeWitt, Green cited reading as a foundational tool in her approach to artmaking, one that informs her continued investigations into points of transmission between artists and aesthetic strategies.

Since 1994, Green has created work under the moniker of Free Agent Media, a speculative production company that publishes books and new media artworks. Between 1991 and 2003, she primarily exhibited outside the United States, traveling and working in Mexico, Vienna, and Santa Barbara before finding a home base in New York City and an outpost in Somerville, Massachusetts. The past decade has yielded thirty international exhibitions, including a two-year residency at her neighboring Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University. Since 2011, Green has taught in the Art, Culture, and Technology program at MIT.

“The Equator Has Moved” brings together over forty works that follow Green’s readings and wanderings among a lexicon of archives. Her references range from Theodore Roosevelt’s colonial expeditions to Angela Davis’s status as a political fugitive. Her journeys also transit fictional landscapes and eradicated sites of natural heritage. Echoing her early literary inclinations, Green told me that the people and places she explores exist “as characters because [she is] creating them and imagining them in relation to written material and documentation.” As she put it, “There are different journeys that exist in the work.”

Organized by Jordan Carter, curator and codepartment head at Dia Art Foundation, the exhibition functions as a kind of mini retrospective where Green’s linguistic sensibilities and adopted modalities of color operate alongside participatory works as a form of travel. The hyper-chroma of Green’s installation in Dia’s north-south central corridor is underscored by meditations on the pervasive politics of color. The earliest work in the exhibition, Colour Games (1989), consists of four quadrants of wooden slats, painted green, yellow, red, and blue. Tilted forty-five degrees, like Venetian blinds, the slats allow viewers to barely decipher the text written across the quadrants: “Colour / games / will be / banned.” Behind the skewed slats is a black-and-white washed background that lists out “African Sports,” “White Sports,” “Coloured Sports,” and “Indian Sports.” The artwork was originally an interactive device with manual shutters, and participants could arbitrate between the bold hues, revealing and concealing racialized.

Green’s Color series (1990), on view in its entirety for the first time, also speaks to these reflections. Notably, Color I (1990) is a grid of paint swatches captioned with exoticized monikers such as “Mexican Orange” and “Indian Ivory.” The palettes are accompanied by pull quotes of character dialogue about racial injustice from the books Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted (1892) by Frances E. W. Harper and The Great Gatsby (1925) by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The tagged samples serve as abridgements of these texts. Here, Green shines light on the parallel narrativizations of color and race. With color as the point of contact, she travels between formalism and considerations of identity and difference.¹

While Green journeys between networks of relation, the written word maintains its adaptive presence in her oeuvre. When asked by an audience member in a Q&A about her artistic relationship to emerging technologies such as augmented reality, Green responded without hesitation, “Well, I think of reading as a technology.”² Her interfacing with reading as a contemporary device has materialized in her aforementioned Space Poems. The quartet of newly commissioned Space Poems that deck Dia’s rafters feature excerpts from poet May Swenson, writer Jorge Luis Borges, and Green herself. Here, Green re-examines the structure of this series by fabricating a section of a previous Space Poem as enamel wall panels. The sheen plaques bring Green’s banners to eye level, allowing viewers to confront existence and disappearance via the names of historical maps, cartographers, and vanished gardens. The name of the ancient Roman public garden Porticus Pompeiana is inscribed in bubblegum pink, while Takht-e Soleyman, an archeological site of Iran’s Sassanian Empire, appears in dusty mint. In saturated pools of pigment, Green reasserts the memory of these buried sites. The collective space and wall poems speak to Green’s ability to collapse timelines and rematerialize traces of the forgotten.

Green’s ideations on storytelling and place extend to Elsewhere? [Wall Version] (2002/2025). The alphabetical index sorts fictitious lands identified in Alberto Manguel and Gianni Guadalupi’s The Dictionary of Imaginary Places (1980, 1987, 1999), with additional entries from Green’s readings. From Atlantis to Zanthodon, the anthology is vertically divided into seven sections: yellow, orange, pink, sky blue, green, red, and navy. The text in Elsewhere? (as in the Space Poems) is separated only by space and not by punctuation. This blending of language elicits an anonymity in which the products of one author’s imagination become indistinguishable from another’s. In turn, Green engages in Roland Barthes’s famous concept of the “death of the author” in which “the responsibility for a narrative is never assumed by a person but by a mediator.”³ Green’s mediations and application of narrative technologies result in the convergence of past and present, real and imagined.

The migratory path of the exhibition is bookmarked by installation works that behave as isles of reflection. They take the form of dioramic stagings and modular media booths. Pigskin Library (1991) resurrects Theodore Roosevelt’s traveling repository of books that accompanied him on his early twentieth-century expeditions to Africa. On these journeys, Roosevelt collected organic matter on behalf of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC, and the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Bound in animal hide, the books in his library included literary classics: The Iliad, The Odyssey, Dante’s Inferno, and works of fiction by Charles Dickens and Mark Twain. In Green’s mise-en-scène, John Philip Sousa’s patriotic march “Corcoran Cadets” plays on a loop while visitors view two wooden file boxes, one linking a color code to the Latin names of animal species and another to indexing systems with unpredictable outcomes like gambling and divination.

Logics of eco-domination and imperial voyeurism are also present in Peak (1991). The white vertical podium is marked with muddy footprints that lead to a replication of an Ansel Adams photograph of a mountainscape. An adjacent telescope, ladder, and binoculars signal the ability to spectate and peer into the rocky terrain marked “Olympus” with a flag planted at its peak. On the structure’s backside are medals awarding explorers accompanied by claims of their victory. The second place recipient states, “Kima ja Kegnia, Mount of Whiteness…It has only been seen by myself.” Alluding to the erasure of prior Indigenous settlers and pointing out ironies of colonial narratives, Green’s tableaus are retellings that parody the heroism attached to Western traditions of claiming land “discovery.”

Punctuating the exhibition’s landscape are Bicho Units (2025) and Sonic Bichos (2025). Inspired by the interactive sculptures of Brazilian artist Lygia Clark, the single-person enclosures are built from opaque fabric panels supported by octagonal metal frames. Within the contained environs play video and sound works. While one film foregrounds the ecologies of Native coastal habitations, another revisits Smithson’s entropic earthwork Partially Buried Woodshed (1970) using archival footage and documentation of the site’s decay. In a Bicho just a few steps away, an anonymous voice whispers, “This journey is exploring us.” In a striking assemblage of found media, scripted dialogue, and stills from Green’s past works, the Bichos function as sites of convergence. Overlaying notions of place, public memory, and formal excavation, they encapsulate the essayistic nature of Green’s referential ontology. “The Equator Has Moved” offers the promise of a journey ongoing, but just as one may find refuge and new understanding in the pages of a book, Green’s invocations crescendo in these moments of solitude.

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¹ Kobena Mercer, “Archive and Dépaysement in the Art of Renée Green,” in Renée Green: Ongoing Becomings 1989–2009 (Lausanne: Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts, JRP|Ringier, 2009), 20.
² Renée Green and Jordan Carter, “A Conversation with Renée Green,” public conversation at Dia Beacon, Beacon, NY, March 8, 2025.
³ Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image, Music, Text, translated by Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 142.