Baseball, service to country, Fourth of July, and the family bar, Joe’s Twin Villa in Osterville, provide the imagery by which Cape Cod artist Joe Diggs explores, memorializes, and celebrates his African American family.
Diggs’s works, with mixed media and photographic underpinnings, have swooping brushstrokes, glancing lines, and dripping swaths of paint. Hovering between action painting, graffiti, and realism, they are complicated compositions in which faces, text, or symbols provide clues to Diggs’s family’s place in the history of the U.S.A.
- Mara Williams
"I have always been pushed to define my work in one way, but I cannot because I am many things at one time, all of which are layered into my paintings."
My artistic base and inspiration is my backyard view of Micha’s Pond in Osterville MA where generations of my family have lived, loved, and worked. As a young man, I, like many of my friends, left Cape Cod to experience the world. I studied art and traveled extensively to then return home to my family and run our family businesses. I then painted my landscape through new eyes, moving from the representation of my youth into the layered abstraction to include all the layers of meaning that emerge in full voice. Even after all this time, there is always something new to explore, discover and paint. My life and my paintings embody the contradictory dialectic of my existence as a land-owning Black man in America. I have always been pushed to define my work in one way, but I cannot because I am many things at one time, all of which are layered into my paintings.
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