Stuart Diamond

Bio

Stuart Diamond is an American artist best known for ambitiously-scaled painted mixed-media assemblages he calls ‘constructs’. A mature piece from this 15-year body of work - ‘Wings’ 1980 (now in the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago) features Mr. Diamond’s signature encrusted paint surfaces and experimentation with spatial dynamics. Eventually his work evolved from such shaped and dimensional surfaces to ‘flat’ painting structures, yet it has always maintained the radical aesthetics of collage. Across five decades Mr. Diamond has addressed personal themes of gender and domestic relations and family and social dynamics, as well as the conventions of painting itself. 

Stuart Diamond has exhibited in the U.K., France and Germany and was included in the inaugural Sunshine Museum international exhibition in Beijing, China in 2008. In the United States he has had 11 solo shows, six with the venerable McKee Gallery. Mr. Diamond is represented in major museum collections including MoMA, New York, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the Southwest Regional Museum, Corpus Christi and two museums in Florida – the Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art, and the Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art. In 2005 he was one of six international artists chosen to create works on the theme of the cold war for a 50-year memorial exhibition in Eschlkam, Germany. 

Mr. Diamond is the recipient of numerous awards including two NEA grants, a Guggenheim Travelling Scholarship - which took him to Africa, and a prize for painting from the National Academy for Design (New York). His work has been reviewed by the critics John Yau, Ken Johnson and Roberta Smith; and he is featured in Chapter 7 of The Pluralist Era: American Art 1968 – 1981 by Corinne Robins.

Throughout his career Mr. Diamond has played an active professional role in various institutional capacities. He has been a Governor of Skowhegan School of Arts, and a repeat juror for the Joan Mitchell Prize. From the outset Mr. Diamond has operated as an advocate for artists and the arts from beyond institutional walls. Following his inclusion in the Whitney Biennial of 1974 - aged just 35, Mr. Diamond participated in the ‘Whitney Counterweight’, a pressure group that sought greater diversity in the Whitney’s selection process for the Bienniel. In 1978, together with Eliot Lable and Michael Walls he organized the landmark “Constructs: 55 Artists” show at the Bleecker Street Renaissance Building, which featured work by Frank Stella, Linda Benglis and Ralph Humphrey among other luminaries of the genre. 

Mr. Diamond received his BFA in Painting from Pratt Institute where he studied under Richard Linder and Stephen Greene. He taught for 12 years at Columbia University and for 35 years at Parsons School of Design. He also taught at RISD, Cooper Union and Pratt Institute during this time. He was a faculty member in the international summer program at the Pont Aven School of Arts in Brittany, France for more than a decade. He is currently Professor of Painting and former Fine Arts Department Chair at Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston. He maintains a studio in Boston, Massachusetts.