Martha Diamond (born 1944) conveys the romanticism and the spirituality of the New York cityscape in paintings that are at once hallucinatory and solidly, vibrantly tactile. Born in Manhattan, raised in Queens and educated at Carleton College (B.A., 1964), the Alliance Française de Paris (diploma with honors, 1965) and New York University (M.A., 1969), she moved into a Bowery loft in 1969 and became an active participant in the downtown scene. There she fell in with New York School poets like Bill Berkson, John Giorno and Peter Schjeldahl (with whom she had studied at Carleton) and took inspiration from such New York School artists as Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning and Joan Mitchell, as well as Fairfield Porter and Alex Katz from its figurative wing.

Diamond exhibited with Brooke Alexander from 1976 until 1985 and at the legendary Robert Miller Gallery, home to Louise Bourgeois, Lee Krasner, Robert Mapplethorpe and Joan Mitchell, from 1985 until 1994. She is currently represented by the David Kordansky Gallery in New York and Los Angeles, where she will have her first West Coast solo show in March 2024. Later in 2024 she will be the subject of a survey organized by the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut, and the Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville, Maine, where it will debut in July. A monograph will be published in connection with these shows as well.

Courtesy of the Martha Diamond Trust