Martha Diamond: Deep Time

November 17, 2024 to May 18, 2025 | Camera Obscura, Opatrny Gallery, Sound Gallery, Bridge Gallery, South Gallery, Balcony Gallery

Your life is defined in time. The way I relate to this in my work is by thinking of infinity: to the time of religion, of history…using shapes that have been significant to people for thousands of years.

—Martha Diamond, interviewed for the Whitney Biennial 1989

Colby College Museum of Art: July 13 to October 13, 2024
The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum: November 17, 2024 to May 18, 2025

Martha Diamond is among the most perceptive painters of the last five decades. Her work’s formal concision and painterly bravado reflect an inner dialogue with generations of abstract artists, and the results are exceptional: an inimitable handling of gesture and space that reimagines the landscape tradition while deftly sliding between abstraction and representation. Comprised of paintings, works on paper, and monotypes, this focused survey of Diamond’s career proposes “deep time” as a new way of understanding her contribution to American painting.

As a concept, deep time has two histories: Enlightenment scientists, poets, and theologians have theorized it to trace symmetries and parallels across the development of human civilization, and geologists use it to describe cycles of stability and upheaval across many millions of years on this planet. In conversation with both ancient monuments and the modern skyscraper, and carrying its own distinctive psychology and ecology, Diamond’s art thinks about time and across time.

This exhibition spotlights the architectural and compositional fascinations that define Diamond’s singular vision. It emphasizes her unswerving commitment to capturing the emotional character of built space, tracking throughlines across mediums and methods to reveal a process that combines spirited experimentation with perceptive observation. The exhibition features rarely seen pieces from the Lower Manhattan studio Diamond occupied for fifty-four years, from the little-known “single-picture” images of the 1970s to the vertiginous paintings of her native New York City during the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s to the vivid abstractions that increasingly characterized her later work.

The exhibition is accompanied by the artist’s first major monograph, an amply illustrated catalogue that includes an original essay by the exhibition’s co-curators, a chronology, and texts reprinted from some of Diamond’s most insightful critics: New York poets steeped in the visual arts. Martha Diamond: Deep Time documents the inspirations that converge in, and are transformed by, Diamond’s enigmatic and utterly original work.

This exhibition is co-organized by The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum and the Colby College Museum of Art, and co-curated by The Aldrich’s Chief Curator, Amy Smith-Stewart and Colby’s Katz Consulting Curator, Levi Prombaum.

Installation Images

A hallway with an abstract painting at center and a blue painting on the right wall.

A white wall with a row of small paintings

A white wall with a row of small abstract paintings

The corner of a room with a bench in the center and a row of small paintings

Three large vertical paintings hung on a white wall

Two abstract paintings on a wall with big gestural brushwork

View of a corner of a gallery with a painting hung on each wall.

A large abstract greenish painting on a white wall.

About The Artist

Black and white photo of a woman standing in a loft studio space.

Martha Diamond (1944-2023) received a BA from Carleton College in Minnesota in 1964 and, after a period of living abroad in Paris, an MA from New York University in 1969. She was an active participant in New York’s art and poetry scenes in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Her work has been shown at major New York galleries and institutions from the mid-1970s on, including solo exhibitions at Robert Miller Gallery, Brooke Alexander Gallery, Galerie Eva Presenhuber, and the New York Studio School and important group shows at Skarstedt, the Hill Art Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. She also had concurrent solo exhibitions in 1988 at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine, and the Portland Museum of Art, Maine. Her work is in the permanent collections of numerous institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine; the Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Maine; the Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; the North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Minneapolis Institute of Art; and the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. Her work was in the former collection of The Aldrich and was exhibited at the museum in group exhibitions in 1973, 1974, 1985, and 1988. She is currently represented by David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles and New York. For more information, please visit marthadiamondtrust.org.

Videos

Presented by The Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, The Colby Museum of Art, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, and The Martha Diamond Trust: A conversation with artists Ann Craven and Nicole Wittenberg, moderated by Rob Storr

A conversation hosted by Brooklyn Rail: Martha Diamond: Deep Time, featuring Ilka Scobie, Joel Shapiro, Anne Waldman, and Phong H. Bui

Press Release

Press

“Beginning with exploratory depictions of the cloistered space of her New York City studio in the 1960s, this tight survey of Martha Diamond’s oeuvre explodes outward into meditations on the psycho-spaces of both ancient monuments and contemporary buildings.”
—Hyperallergic

“The influential downtown painter of semi-abstracted Manhattan buildings, who died in 2023, gets her first major monograph and an in-depth survey, organized with the Colby College Museum of Art.”
—The New York Times

“The paintings on display at the Aldrich show the distinct panache with which Diamond applied her colors—“conspicuous,” she called them—using her nondominant left hand, a tip she picked up in Paris.”
—Vogue

“the recognition she enjoyed was never quite in proportion to her achievement, and we can only hope that “Martha Diamond: Deep Time,” a small but jaw-dropping survey now at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, will be the first step in her ascent into the upper reaches of art history”
—The New York Times

“I left both shows thinking that by the time Diamond died she had become one of the best painters of her generation.”
—Hyperallergic

“Diamond fills her canvases with psychological drama just by recording the inherent moodiness of concrete and steel. She paints what she sees, unemotionally and from and distance, and yet the results wind up looking like the effusions of a tortured soul.”
—Financial Times

Funders

Martha Diamond: Deep Time is co-organized by The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum and the Colby College Museum of Art. Major support for the exhibition and accompanying publication is provided by an anonymous donor; additional support is provided by Agnes Gund, David Kordansky Gallery, and The Evelyn Toll Family Foundation. Support at The Aldrich was also provided by Diana Bowes and Jim Torrey and the Eric Diefenbach and James Keith Brown Publications Fund.

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