ne sunny morning in 2009, with a group of friends, I took the train from Grand Central Terminal to Beacon, New York. I was 20, and despite being an obsessive creative I had never had a genuinely transcendent experience in a museum. Whether it was the mobs of tourists, sub-optimal lighting, or distracting placards, attending exhibitions in the city was for me a passive act of looking at art, not one of actually seeing it.
When I entered Dia Beacon that day, I found myself in vast, peaceful rooms, flooded with natural light and sans placards. I was consumed by the Agnes Martin paintings, moved by the Dan Flavin installations, in awe of the Richard Serra sculptures. In the Robert Ryman gallery—revelation.