A Language of Dualities Joe Diggs paints the many meanings of history
The Provincetown Independent BY OLIVER EGGER AUG 30, 2023
The painter Joe Diggs has had ancestors living on Cape Cod since the 1800s. His step-great-grandfather, Gideon Gomes, was a Cape Verdean free man of color who bought the large property in Osterville that Diggs still calls home. “They started their homestead right here,” he says, pointing to the floor beneath his feet.
Joe Diggs discussing his painting Independence Day. (Photos by Oliver Egger)
Diggs’s paintings will be displayed at the Berta Walker Gallery in Provincetown from Sept. 8 to Oct. 1 in a show titled “United We Stand,” which also includes the work of abstract painter Erna Partoll. Diggs has been showing at the gallery for “six to eight years,” he says, adding, “Somewhere in there. I don’t know. I don’t have a good grasp on time. Some days go on forever, and then a year goes by in an hour.”
Time is at the center of Diggs’s paintings, which refuses to sit neatly in one moment, place, or mood. His work is about how history — both his family’s and all Black Americans’ — permeates the present. His paintings go back and forth between a history of violence and loss and the ever-present possibility of spiritual transformation through art itself. He says that this fluidity is an “exciting language that I’m coming up with on my own. It’s just a pure language — a Joe language.”
Diggs’s journey into art began after a loss. “I had an older brother who was an artist,” says Diggs. “I always wanted to be better than him at anything he could do. He passed away when he was 19 and I was 16.” Diggs says he turned to painting to find strength in what his brother loved to do. It became a lifelong passion.
