project spotlight on:

Artist, JOE DIGGS  |  https://joediggs.art/artworks/

"Joseph “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...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."

- Guest Curator, Mara Williams

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"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 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.  — Essay, Seph Rodney

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