JOE DIGGS

EVOLVING CIRCLES JOE DIGGS

cover, detail: MARGE AND JESTER : 2021 : OIL ON CANVAS : 24 x 48 in : Collection of Lizabeth Cohen and Herrick Chapman

EVOLVING CIRCLES JOE DIGGS

JULY 18 - SEPTEMBER 7, 2025

PROVINCETOWN ART ASSOCIATION AND MUSEUM, PROVINCETOWN, MA, 02657 : PAAM.ORG

DIGGS RACE RELATIONS : 2015 : OIL ON CANVAS : 36 x 20 in

“DIGGS NEVER ENTIRELY FORGETS...HISTORY AND HIS POSITION AS A BLACK MAN IN IT, BUT AT TIMES, HE LEAVES THIS ASIDE TO TOUCH OTHER TENDER PLACES IN HIMSELF.”

SEPH RODNEY, P h D

ESSAY : SEPH RODNEY : ALL THE RICHES

W hat first strikes me about the paintings of Joe Diggs is the overabundance of ideas. The phrase that comes to my mind is “an embarrassment of riches.” It’s worth asking why I might be embarrassed. Perhaps because the exquisite struggle that his paintings produce in me is that to properly to take them in, I feel I have to find a place in myself to put all this extravagant grandeur. Wandering with him through his studio and then later through his website, I realize I am too small. There isn’t room enough in my heart’s house to carry all this profligate thought and perception. I’ve never felt so limited encountering an artist’s work. At his studio in Cape Cod, Massachusetts I spend hours looking and marveling at the cardboard dividers from Chinese takeout food he’s used to depict whole planetary systems cycling towards and away from their entropic doom, paper shopping bags, splayed open and painted with acrylic on each side so that each reads like pages in a massive book — flip them forward and back and enter a dream of the endless. There are also small to medium-size canvases he’s used wood trimmed by hand to frame relentlessly inventive abstract worlds, no two quite the same. Eventually, I tell him I have to stop looking. I’ve run out of bandwidth. Later, peering at the photographs I took that day, I ask myself how Diggs’s imagination became so large, a conduit for so much.

I turn to the rudimentary inventory for insight: Joseph Vincent Diggs, born of Deborah Ann Jackson, makes portraiture. Some of these works seem more concerned with documenting a certain cultural moment and saying something about how we typically see each other, such as the Baller series, for example Baller Red Black & Green (2017) which contains an x-ray of some unknown person’s lungs and a black and white photograph of a baseball summer league player, Mr. Jones. The work, collaged onto a plywood rectangle, suggests that our view of the figure is typically superficial, not delving like the radiograph into a body’s hidden infrastructure. Through his paintings, Diggs dives into the social and psychic plumbing of the place and people he knows. For instance, a gentle portrait of his father, Sargeant first class George Ralph Diggs in Race Relations (2015) depicts the elder Diggs, who began his military career in the Army as a infantryman and later became a drill sergeant and a recruiter. The actual pin his dad wore, “Diggs Race Relations”, is affixed to the painting, while the father gazes out with a resigned expression. The portrait is about more than his father; it captures a moment in the historical development of our collective understanding of and experience with race, somewhere north of “colored” and “negro,” but south of “African American” when Black people were still considered fundamentally alien to the popular idea of “American.” Diggs never entirely forgets this history and his position as a Black man in it, but at times, he leaves this aside to touch other tender places in himself.

COVE AT MICHA’S : 2022 : OIL ON CANVAS : 48 x 60 in

JOE DIGGS

EVOLVING CIRCLES

ESSAY :

SEPH RODNEY ALL THE RICHES

Diggs’ portrait of his older brother, Craig Wayne Diggs, I Dare You holding two sections of watermelon, one in each hand, and wearing red swim trunks and sandals with a white shirt over his shoulders. He may be weighing the slices, deciding which one to devour and which to share. This is the person who initially spurred Diggs to get into art. As he attests: “I started making art, really, in high school. My brother was working on trying to be an artist, and he’s three years older than me. He was my idol, so I just followed him around. I did everything he did. I didn’t have any personality. So, I just hung out...I’m a middle child, so, you know, little issues there.” Then, at a certain point in high school, Diggs begins to acknowledge (with the help of several teachers) that something in him was good and unique, and competition with his brother showed him the way: “I was trying to beat my brother on because, you know, he just whooped my ass on everything. So, it was like, I got to beat you with something, and I just wanted to be better than him.” Craig Diggs died in a car collision at 19, and then the artist became unmoored for a time. But the place he had come to in that striving with his brother gave him a sense of himself that would not fade or falter.

Joe Diggs makes landscapes. Consider Cove at Micha’s, (2022) with a brooding dark corner of the lake contending with the mystery of the mushy background of green forest, while in the middle-distance tree limbs cavort with lighter green swirls and dashes as if the place is not wholly natural, not entirely imaginative but a collaboration between the painter and the perceived world. An oil on linen piece Untitled form 2019 is more mysterious, in a primarily black and white landscape with water and bare winter trees visible, there are also masses of shrouded bodies that seem like black, white and golden ghosts, settled on the periphery of the water, waiting for their chance to make themselves more fully known.

Yes. At some point, these unsettled phantoms were representative of Joe Diggs, and then later, not, when he grasped that he had much to process growing up in a military family and coming of age in a hybrid neighborhood where oligarchs live alongside people from Cape Verde along with other Black people. Part of his story is also spending 15 years of his working life as a flight attendant. All the contrasts and inklings of worlds he’s inhabited and worlds just glimpsed come out in his paintings.

The abstract paintings are marvels — every one. It’s difficult to describe what he’s doing in these paintings because that never stops changing. I see an extended family of art historical ancestors that, though related, never read as produced by a mentor-pupil relationship. I see Hundertwasser, and Jack Whitten, Frank Bowling and Gerhard Richter. I see Helen Frankenthaler and Minor White. He tells me that he refused to pay attention to Ernie Barnes, Jean Michel Basquiat, and John Biggers because he felt their influence

INDEPENDENCE DAY ON THE VINEYARD : 2015 : ACRYLIC AND OIL ON CANVAS : 60 x 50 in

JOE DIGGS

EVOLVING CIRCLES

ESSAY :

SEPH RODNEY ALL THE RICHES

would be too heavy on him. Time has ratified his choice to stay within himself; he is a painter who can, at will, change his game. Brown Paper Bag Series No. 1 (2024) shows his facility using a colorful grid to overlay a scene of organic, tubular growth meeting a cityscape containing places of habitation. Yet as I describe one painting, I know I’ve only described one planet within an entire system of swirling galaxies with undying suns, moons, and stars.

Diggs has also made work for a Boys Being Boys project in which he was teaching painting to incarcerated youth in a Division of Youth Services Detention Center Program at Nickerson State Park in Brewster, MA, from 2015 to 2024. Additionally, he created Project 23 with Rick and Linda Sharp to locate and document people who had been part of a Headstart program in Providence, Rhode Island, in the 1970s.

All these concerns and stylistic variants come together in his history paintings. A powerful example is Independence Day on the Vineyard (2015). The painting documents a visit to Martha’s Vineyard on the Independence Day holiday. The overall color scheme of red, white, and blue marks the image as one that contends with America’s past. As he tells me, Diggs and a friend, Dino Smith, brought Smith’s grandson to the Vineyard to see where African-Americans could first buy homes in the community. They sunbathed and rubbed the clay they found in the ground on their skins instead of sunblock. The boy is partly hidden, protected by the older men from the gruesome aspects of the nation’s history, including what are meant to be chalk outlined parts of James Byrd Jr’s body, indicated on the right quadrant of the canvas. Byrd Jr. was dragged to death along a three-mile stretch of asphalt road in Jasper, Texas, in 1998, chained by his ankles to a pickup truck driven by three men, two of whom were avowed white supremacists. Here we can see the combination of portraiture, a small glimpse of landscape, the abstraction that’s meant to allude to records of a murder, and that lush blend of colors that make it seem as if the entire composition had emerged from a fever dream.

Diggs says that one of the questions he asks himself is whether the thing he’s created is surreal or sublime. This sounds like his way of asking whether he is placing an overlay on a lived experience (thus creating a surreal thing, literally upon the real), or crafting an experience that abandons the everyday, travels to a place where the viewer has left earthly substance behind, as when ice sublimes away into vapor. His painting is about both motions, toward and away, always plucking at my hands, always testing and probing, seeing how much more I can hold.

“I BELIEVE THAT THERE ARE SOUNDS WE HAVE NOT HEARD. I BELIEVE THAT THERE ARE COLORS WE HAVE NOT SEEN. AND I BELIEVE THAT THERE ARE FEELINGS YET TO BE FELT.”

JACK WHITTEN ARTIST (1939 - 2018)

“OUR LIFE IS AN APPRENTICESHIP TO THE TRUTH, THAT AROUND EVERY CIRCLE ANOTHER ONE CAN BE DRAWN; THAT THERE IS NO END IN NATURE, BUT EVERY END IS A BEGINNING; THAT THERE IS ALWAYS ANOTHER DAWN RISEN ON MID-NOON, AND UNDER EVERY DEEP A LOWER DEEP OPENS...”

RALPH WALDO EMERSON POET | ESSAYIST (1803 - 1882)

JOE DIGGS

GUEST CURATOR : MARA WILLIAMS : EVOLVING CIRCLES

J oseph “Joe” Diggs’s art resists categorization. It toggles between figuration and abstraction through a tangle of swooping brushstrokes, glancing lines, and dripping swaths of paint. His evocative figurative works show us faces, buildings, and landscapes that distill the essence of his family’s place in the physical, social, and cultural life of the Mid Cape. In his abstract compositions, disparate marks cohere into surprising equilibrium. Evolving Circles is a mid- career survey that traces the currents of Diggs’s artistic output over the past decade.

Diggs’s creative energy flows from a deeply rooted sense of place and personal history. The properties that nurture and protect multiple generations of his African American/Cape Verdean family are located in the village of Osterville, a toney enclave on Cape Cod. Over the past 25 years, Diggs has created a series of paintings memorializing and celebrating the family-owned bar that, while humble in appearance and now gone, holds an outsized place in the hearts of those who knew it in its glory.

Joe’s Twin Villa was opened by Joe Gomes, the artist’s grandfather, during Prohibition. Located on an otherwise quiet residential street, the Villa was where successive generations of the Cape’s Black community danced to the music of local bands, the jukebox, and, later, to music spun by a DJ. The bar also had the distinction of being integrated, providing a variety of townies and summer folks a lively music scene not available elsewhere.

The Villa did not survive a changing Osterville; it was shuttered in 2008 and torn down in 2024. But it lives on in Diggs’s work. Where Pickled Ham Hocks Jammin’ (2016) is a jazzy take on the denizens of the bar, Joe’s at Sea (2020) sets the Villa afloat in the soft, vaporous space where sea meets sky. These paintings are part homage, part syncopated riff, and part meditation on loss.

Down the street and through the woods from the Villa is the family compound. Tucked into a forest of scrub pine and pin oak, the place is perched above the dazzling waters of Micah Pond, which is the heart of the property. Micha’s, as it is familiarly called, is a deep, clear kettle pond formed by the retreat of the Laurentide ice sheet 18,000 years ago. A sweeping arc defines its shore; when the placid surface is disturbed by a breeze, ripples radiate across the water. Micha’s is an animating presence in Diggs’s oeuvre. He has made hundreds of paintings of the pond, capturing it in all seasons. Featuring inventive and ever-changing perspectives and expressive use of color and tone, Diggs breathes new life into the centuries-old genre of landscape painting.

PICKLED HAM HOCK JAMMIN’ : 2016 : OIL ON CANVAS : 33 x 42 in : Collection of Provincetown Art Association Museum, Gift of Berta Walker

JOE DIGGS

EVOLVING CIRCLES

GUEST

CURATOR : MARA WILLIAMS : EVOLVING CIRCLES

One of these works is Untitled (2019). My first encounter with this painting was a defining moment in my understanding of alchemy, animism, and transubstantiation. In many aboriginal cultures, totems are not representations of ancestors, they are the ancestors, just as in Roman Catholicism, the host is not a symbol of the body of Christ, it is the body of Christ. At first glance, Untitled is a winter view of Micha’s, seen through a tracery of black limbs and branches. Rising off the soft blue-gray water are delicate veils of gray and gold mist that hover in the spaces between and in the trees. As the mist darkens, it appears to form itself into figures. I was so startled by this manifestation — this energy — that I blurted out, “Joe, you invited your ancestors to the studio?” His reply was direct and matter-of-fact: “Oh, they just show up and make their presence known from time to time.”

Throughout his career, Diggs has taken his work beyond place and family lore into the abstract. His restless energy, fertile mind, and improvisatory nature, combined with a willingness to continuously experiment with new materials and techniques, permit him to successfully navigate multiple modes of expression.

I Remember You (2023) occupies a middle ground between figuration and abstraction. In this work, circles emerge from circles; solids emerge from voids. Some forms are hefty, others translucent and weightless. Are we deep in the woods or in an underwater cavern? Perhaps it is a landscape of the mind, a panorama of the unconscious. This painting suggests not only the grandeur of nature but also the ambiguity of dreams.

Diggs often says, “Make a mark, support it; make more marks, support them.” Dreads (2016) is rooted in drawing practice, with rhythmic, repeating calligraphic marks of black and white paint accumulating up and across the canvas, suggesting craggy rock formations or dreadlocks. These foreground “figures” are set atop an ambiguous background of yellows, grays, and rusts. The purposeful incompleteness of meaning heightens the psychological tension of the work.

In his most recent abstract work, Diggs has introduced more hard-edged, geometric forms and sponged and imprinted textures. His deft juxtaposition of multiple patterns rendered in eye- popping colors suggests a deep connection to jazz, hip-hop, and the weaving traditions of Africa.

Diggs has paid assiduous attention to family, nature, and community, as well as artistic and cultural histories. His attentiveness to the world expresses itself in paint. Beyond their immediate visceral impact, his works have a way of drawing us into his world and engaging us visually, mentally, and emotionally in their breathtaking physicality and nuanced humanity.

Mara Williams, Guest Curator

“IN

GENERAL

ONE CAN

SAY WITH CERTAINTY THAT THERE IS IN ALL THE WORK A PARTICULAR VITALITY, AN ATTITUDE OF ALIVENESS, OF VIVID EQUILIBRIUM...THAT SETS THE WORK APART IN VISUAL PRESENCE.”

APRIL KINGSLEY , P h D

ART HISTORIAN | CURATOR (1941 - 2023)

JOE DIGGS

EVOLVING CIRCLES

ARTIST STATEMENT : JOE DIGGS

I paint from observation, but I also give my art the freedom to be spontaneous, which spawns new work.

By allowing impromptu action, I let go of the desire to control everything in the artistic process. This grants me a voyeuristic space in which I can operate. I react intuitively to chance, and reflect my findings back to my audience; I am a voyeur and a medium wrapped into one person. I blend figuration and abstraction with a basis in landscape, which gives me the space to make work that is both gestural and emotionally hypnotic.

The process of making art helps me emotionally by providing a physical escape.

left: photo of Joe Diggs by Russ Price — with MARDI GRAS : 2024 : ACRYLIC ON CANVAS : 55 x 66 in

SUMMER COLORS : 2024 : OIL ON CANVAS : 36 x 48 in : Private Collection, Massachusetts

above: BALLER RED BLACK AND GREEN : 2016 : MIXED MEDIA : 20 x 16 in

right, detail: GENERATIONS : 2020 : OIL ON CANVAS : 76 x 100 in : Private Collection, Massachusetts

STORMY WEATHER : 2018 : OIL ON CANVAS : 36 x 48 in : Collection of Alfred and Liz Kobacker

GHOST OF JOE’S : 2017 : OIL ON CANVAS : 48 x 60 in : Private Collection, Vermont

above: MARGE AND JESTER : 2021 : OIL ON CANVAS : 24 x 48 in : Collection of Lizabeth Cohen and Herrick Chapman

right, detail: GOLDEN POND : 2023 : OIL ON CANVAS : 51 x 61 in

MARDI GRAS : 2024 : ACRYLIC ON CANVAS : 55 x 66 in

above: SUMMER SENSATION : 2024 : ACRYLIC ON LINEN : 45 x 6 4 in

right: BEYOND THE SURFACE : 2014 - 2021 : OIL ON CANVAS : 60 x 50 in

right, detail: JOE’S AT SEA : 2020 : OIL ON CANVAS : 84 x 71 in

above: GEORGE DIGGS RIDING STAR : 2016 : OIL ON CANVAS ON PANEL : 58 x 37 in

left: NO JUMPING WHILE DANCING : 2016 : MIXED MEDIA : 36 x 27 in : Private Collection, New Jersey

DREADS : 2016 : OIL ON CANVAS : 66 x 60 in : Collection of Peabody and Essex Museum; Gift, Gift of LaShonda and Jonathan Chirunga

UNTITLED V : 2024 : ACRYLIC ON BOARD : 32 x 30 in

above: NUMBERS : 2025 : ACRYLIC ON CANVAS : 8 x 10 in

left, detail: DOMINOS : 2025 : ACRYLIC ON CANVAS : 10 x 10 in

WARM WINTER : 2020 : OIL ON CANVAS : 16 x 20 in

MISSING KRAIG : 2019 : OIL ON CANVAS : 72 x 36 in

JOE DIGGS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

GRATITUDE TO:

The entire team at the Provincetown Art Association Museum, under the leadership of Christine McCarthy, for the opportunity to share my work with PAAM members, patrons, and the public in their beautiful gallery. To Mara Williams for her sensitive curation of the show and illuminating introduction to my art; to Steph Rodney for his insightful essay.

The collectors and institutions lending paintings to the exhibit: Lizabeth Cohen and Herrick Chapman; Alfred and Liz Kobacker; Provincetown Art Association Museum, Gift of Berta Walker; the owners wishing to remain anonymous.

The donors supporting the production of this catalog: Lennie Alickman; Byllye Avery and Ngina Lythcott; The Begary Charitable Trust; Charles Sumner Bird Foundation; Nancy Cardwell, PhD; Lizabeth Cohen and Herrick Chapman; Thomas and M. Ann Hilsdon; Bob Ross (the other one); Rob Silverstein and Wanda Olson; Berta Walker; In memory of April Kingsley, Ph.D.; those wishing to remain anonymous, as well as contributions received after the print deadline.

I’m indebted to a group of talented women for guiding the production of this exhibit and catalog from start to finish. Nancy Cardwell, Ph.D., City College of New York, for always providing wise council, keeping everything on track, and making introductions to just the right person and the right time. Jen Dragon, Cross Contemporary Art Projects, for restructuring of my website and written materials. Susanna Ronner, Susanna Ronner Graphic Design, for producing this beautiful catalogue.

I’m beholden to the two women who have championed my art and shaped my career. Grace Hopkins, director of the Berta Walker Gallery, whose keen eye spotted my work as I was finishing my M.F.A. at the Massachusetts College of Art program at the Fine Arts Work Center. And the great Berta Walker who has represented me for eight years, paving the way for this moment. Her deep commitment to her artists is unbounded. I’m grateful beyond measure.

— Joe Diggs

ABOUT JOE DIGGS

J oe Diggs has had ancestors living on Cape Cod since the 1800s. His step-great-grandfather, Gideon Gomes, was a Cape Verdean immigrant and free man of color who bought the large property in Osterville that Diggs still calls home. “They started their homestead right here,” he says, pointing to the art studio floor beneath his feet.

Diggs was born to a military family in Croix Chapeau, France. In 1969, he and his family returned to Osterville where he attended Osterville Elementary School and Barnstable High School. In 1983, he graduated from Southeastern Massachusetts University with a B.A. in fine art painting. He then traveled the world as a flight attendant, incorporating global sights, sounds, colors, and cultures into his art practice. He returned to his family homestead in 1998 to run the family bar, Joe’s Twin Villa, until 2008. In 2015, he received his M.F.A. at Massachusetts College of Art and Design at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.

He teaches at the Cotuit Center for the Arts, Castle Hill Arts Center in Truro, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He taught Foundations in Art and Expression to incarcerated youth at the Department of Youth Services in Brewster from 2015 through 2023. He has curated exhibitions for the Cotuit Center for the Arts, the Zion Union Heritage Museum in Hyannis, and the Cape Cod Museum of Art in Dennis.

His work has been exhibited in numerous group and solo exhibitions at institutions throughout New England; his paintings are in many national and international private collections. He is represented by the Berta Walker Gallery in Provincetown.

ABOUT SEPH RODNEY

Seph Rodney, PhD is a regular contributor to The New York Times, and a former senior critic and opinions editor for Hyperallergic. He has also written on art for CNN, NBC, Art in America, Art Forum, The Guardian, and several other publications. In 2020 he won the Rabkin Arts Journalism prize and in 2022 won the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. He is also a curator of contemporary art exhibitions, including co-curating Get in the Game, the largest show that the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has undertaken, which opened October 2024 and will travel to other venues.

ABOUT MARA WILLIAMS

Mara Williams is Curator Emeritus of the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center in Brattleboro, Vermont. She has worked as a guest curator for institutions throughout New England and New York over the course of her 35-year career. She was raised in Osterville, where her family lived walking distance from Joe’s Twin Villa and the Diggs family compound.