Tom Burr: Torrington Project

Between 2021 and 2024 Tom Burr took over a disused nineteenth-century factory in Torrington, Connecticut, and turned it into what he called a living archive; this 400-page book is the project's last element and a deliberately subversive take on the catalogue raisonné.

Neither exhibition nor studio, the building held more than ninety works from across Burr's career, restaged and in some cases restored, while Gordon Hall, Maria Hassabi, and Nick Mauss staged performances in the space and a shifting cast of writers, curators, and friends passed through. Edited by Blake Oetting, the book carries 345 colour and 15 black-and-white images documenting the build-out and the works in situ, Burr's diaristic writing on his stewardship of the building, and archival ephemera, with essays by George Baker, Aria Dean, Renée Green, David Joselit, and others. Dia hosted the launch in September 2025.

Burr (born 1963, New Haven) came out of the Whitney Independent Study Program and American Fine Arts, Co., and belongs to the generation that rebuilt institutional critique and minimalism around questions of identity and public space. His earlier extra-institutional work includes Body/Building, a year-long residency in Marcel Breuer's Pirelli Tire Building in New Haven.