Keith Sonnier (b. 1941, d. 2020) radically reinvented sculpture through groundbreaking interventions in performance, conceptualism, and material. Spanning six decades and a spectrum of mediums, his oeuvre reflects a lifelong attunement to shifting cultural and artistic atmospheres. After moving to New York from Louisiana in the 1960s, Sonnier established important connections with like-minded peers. Alongside contemporaries like Eva Hesse, Gordon Matta-Clark, Bruce Nauman, and Richard Tuttle, Sonnier challenged existing conceptions of what sculpture—and indeed, art itself—could be and do. Working in latex, fabric, bamboo, metal, found objects, sound, video, and the neon tubes for which he’s best known, Sonnier blurred the lines between two- and three-dimensional space—his use of light in layered and often site-specific installations could at once be read as sculpture, multimedia installation, or painterly composition. His early experiments with neon and video in particular—and the way he transformed sculpture from something fixed to something reactive to physical space—led to his inclusion in the historic 1972 Venice Biennale, curated by Walter Hopps, alongside storied artists like Diane Arbus and Sam Gilliam. As the global artistic landscape evolved in the subsequent decades, Sonnier’s sensitivity and openness to new technologies allowed him to distill even the most industrial and unconventional material into its core properties of color, form, texture, and light, resulting in a body of work that continues to reverberate with new associations. 

Sonnier is currently the subject of a long-term solo exhibition at Dia Beacon featuring works from the 1960s and 1970s, many of which recently entered the museum’s collection. Recent solo exhibitions have also been presented at the New Orleans Museum of Art (2019); Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, NY (2018); Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT (2017); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2016); Musée d’Art Moderne et d’Art Contemporain, Nice, France (2015); Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. (1989); and Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (1979). Recent group exhibitions include Minimal, Bourse de Commerce - Pinault Collection, Paris (2025-2026); The American Dream: Pop to the Present, British Museum, London (2017); Museum of Stones, Noguchi Museum, New York (2015); and America is Hard to See, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2015). His work is in the public collections of more than fifty museums worldwide, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves, Porto, Portugal; and Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, Germany.