Joe Diggs: Evolving Circles

Joe Diggs’ creative energy flows from a deeply rooted sense of family and place.

The property nurturing and protecting multiple generations of this African-American/Cape Verdean clan is in Osterville, a toney enclave on Cape Cod. The family compound is tucked into a forest of scrub pine and pin oak and perched above the dazzling waters of Micah’s Pond. Evolving Circles is a mid-career survey tracing the currents of his artistic output over the past decade. 

A practicing artist, curator, and educator, Diggs’ art toggles between figuration and abstraction. Guest curator Mara Williams observes, “His paintings are a tangle of swooping brushstrokes, glancing lines, and dripping swaths of paint. Hovering between action painting, graffiti, and realism, they are evocative compositions in which faces, buildings, or symbols explore, memorialize, and celebrate the family’s place in the social and cultural history of Osterville. Beyond their immediate, visceral impact the paintings have a way of drawing the viewer into Joe’s world and engaging us visually, mentally, emotionally in their breathtaking physicality and the nuance of their story.”

Art critic Steph Rodney in describing a Diggs landscape noted, “[it] is more mysterious, in a mostly 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.”

In describing his process, Diggs notes, “I paint from observation, but allow my art the freedom to be spontaneous, which spawns new work. By allowing impromptu action I omit the desire to control everything in the process. This grants me a voyeuristic space to operate. Being intensely in control without force, I react to chance intuitively, and reflect my findings to my audience. Being a voyeur and a medium wrapped into one. The process of making art has helped me emotionally by providing a physical escape. Blending figuration and abstraction with a basis or departure from landscape, gives me the space to make emotionally hypnotic gestural works.”

Image: Joe Diggs, I Remember You, 2023, oil on linen.