NEW YORK.-Dia Art Foundation and The Hispanic Society of America initiate a three-year collaboration beginning with a project by Belgian artist Francis Al˙s, who in the early 1990s relocated to Mexico City. Commissioned by Dia and installed at the Hispanic Society’s Beaux-Arts facility in Manhattan, Fabiola comprises almost three hundred images of the Christian Saint Fabiola, all of them copies of a lost original. The paintings will be installed in the Society’s mahogany-paneled North Building Galleries. Alys’s collection will be read within the context of the Hispanic Society's unique collection of Iberian and Latin American art, engaging a dialogue between these historical and contemporary collections.

Fabiola is the first of what will be a series of projects commissioned by Dia for the Hispanic Society. The partnership between the two organizations provides a venue for Dia’s renowned New York City programs while Dia locates a new home in Manhattan, and expands audiences for both institutions. The exhibition will take place September 20, 2007 – April 6, 2008 at The Hispanic Society of America, Audubon Terrace, Broadway between 155th and 156th Streets, New York City.

Over the last two decades, Francis Al˙s has assembled a significant collection of nearly identical paintings and other reproductions of fourth-century Saint Fabiola, all based on a now-lost original painted in the nineteenth century by the French artist Jean-Jacques Henner. This obscure work has been assiduously copied by amateurs and professionals alike and has become a popular icon, a phenomenon that, as the artist stated, “indicated a different criterion of what a masterwork could be.” Al˙s’s collection, gathered from flea markets, antique shops, and private collections throughout Europe and the Americas, offers a window onto aesthetic, sociological, and theological values over the past century and more.

The exhibition of these images at the Hispanic Society will for the first time comprise Al˙s’s complete group of almost three hundred Fabiola portraits, mostly paintings, as well as several versions in needlepoint and wood relief, among other materials. These images will hang in the Society’s nineteenth-century painting galleries, ornate and decorative rooms paneled in dark mahogany. Engaging curatorial and institutional protocols and methodologies, their unlikely presence may relate to other objects in the Society’s collection, particularly the vast holdings of religious imagery and portraiture, while shedding new light on contemporary strategies.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a series of public programs including lectures, panel discussions, and gallery talks, as well as special educational initiatives that draw on the relationship between the contemporary project and the Hispanic Society’s permanent collection. In addition, Dia will organize a program for local schools in the Washington Heights neighborhood in which students will visit the Fabiola installation and participate in specially designed activities and projects. In order to expand this outreach effort, Dia will also design online lesson plans in both Spanish and English.

In keeping with Dia’s approach to producing scholarly publications, the Al˙s project will be accompanied by a hardcover book that will include background material on Saint Fabiola, as well as essays by art historians, theological historians, and Dia Curator Lynne Cooke. The publication will also catalogue each Fabiola, including detailed descriptions and photographs, many in full-color.

Francis Al˙s’s distinguished career includes significant projects and exhibitions at major international venues. Born in Belgium in 1959 and originally trained as an architect, Al˙s turned to the visual arts as a more direct way of exploring issues related to urbanization and socio-political conditions. As in his previous professional practice, the artist often works collaboratively within the public sphere, and he has developed an approach to art that is based on the observations of, and engagements with, daily life. Many of Al˙s’s projects are solitary, peripatetic journeys which take the form of urban walks conditioned by particular circumstances. In The Collector (1991–92), for example, the artist pulled a magnetic toy behind him while traversing Mexico City. As metal scraps from across the capital accumulated on the toy, a provisional cartography was inscribed into the metropolitan landscape. At other times, Al˙s works within a community to create a social allegory. One such collaboration, When Faith Moves Mountains (2002), was created for the Third Ibero-American Biennale in Lima, Peru. It involved 500 volunteers who worked together to shift a 500-meter sand dune a few inches from its original site adjacent to an impoverished shanty town in Lima. Also in 2002, Mr. Al˙s created Modern Procession (2002), which marked the Museum of Modern Art’s temporary move to Queens, New York. Additionally, Al˙s’s work is the subject of Francis Al˙s: Politics of Rehearsal, on view at the UCLA Hammer Museum from September 30, 2007 through February 10, 2008.