The Late Martha Diamond Gets Deserved Appreciation in a New Exhibition

Grace Edquist, Vogue, November 1, 2024

For the late artist Martha Diamond, it meant looking up. In her soulful paintings of New York City’s skyscrapers, Diamond used loose ropes of color that land somewhere between abstraction and figuration. Though sparse in detail, her buildings teem, as the city does, with life. Diamond made most of her paintings in her loft on the Bowery, where she lived from 1969 until her death last December, at age 79. Throughout her five-decade career, she didn’t so much re-create what she saw as channel its slippery essence. “I know the city has straight lines or edges,” she said in 1989, “but as I walk around, the ending or beginning of substance becomes less absolute.” Her buildings sway in the wind and glisten in the light. “I think her work is still startling,” says poet Eileen Myles, who was a longtime friend of Diamond’s. “It’s there to wake people up.”

Diamond was interested in “the influences of human history on the land over time,” says Amy Smith-Stewart, chief curator at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut, which on November 17 welcomes “Martha Diamond: Deep Time,” a five-decade survey. (Smith-Stewart cocurated the debut outing of the show with Levi Prombaum at the Colby College Museum of Art.) The artist’s first museum survey in more than three decades, “Deep Time” includes 55 works made from the 1970s through the 2010s, and it’s an overdue tribute to an artist who was renowned among her peers but underappreciated by the wider public. “She was aware of a sense of sexism in the art world, that men were routinely built up and women were routinely taken down,” Myles says.