Duane Linklater's '12 + 2' at Dia Chelsea Challenges Settler Land Art Legacy

Duane Linklater's exhibition '12 + 2' at Dia Chelsea (2025) uses buffalo wallowing as a metaphor for Indigenous land relations, directly confronting Dia Foundation's colonial entanglements. The show includes core samples from Linklater's home in North Bay, Ontario, and boreholes drilled through Dia's floor, connecting Indigenous territory to the gallery. Central work 'wallowposition' features seven abstract buffalo sculptures, with performances by Tanya Lukin Linklater. The exhibition critiques Dia's Land art holdings—Robert Smithson's 'Spiral Jetty', Nancy Holt's 'Sun Tunnels', Walter De Maria's 'The Lightning Field'—which scholars like Alicia Harris and K-Sue Park link to settler colonialism. Dia's recent Indigenous collaborations, including lectures by Kent Monkman and Alan Michelson, and a 2021 video by Duane and Tobias Linklater, are framed as limited gestures that do not alter land stewardship. The foundation's guidebook (2021) acknowledges gentrification and dispossession, but no Indigenous nations are listed as stewarding partners for its sites. The article questions whether Dia can critically reframe Land art without transferring authority to Indigenous nations.