Painter Joe Diggs is having two shows this summer: “Evolving Circles,” a first-time solo exhibition at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum (PAAM) and one which complements it, “Shaping Change,” at Berta Walker Gallery.
He said that the show at PAAM is a retrospective of work created between 2016 and 2025. “There are circles in all my pieces. In college and grad school, I was always trying to figure out how to put a circle inside a square.” And that quest turned into the basis for some of his compositions.
The show’s theme is “about the circles of life” and the way that people and events intersect with each other and come 360 degrees around; the intersectionality of different disciplines, and how his landscapes, figural work, abstractions and new investigation of patterns circle into each other and move forward, “changing space, creating new spatial relationships.” In his circle, “You start with art and end with art.” So, his “Evolving Circles” exhibition is also a “journey of how the work came together” to reveal a kind “of surreal idea of how things happen — all part of the potion.”
And that potion is magicked by a spontaneous creation almost like automatic writing; Diggs’s art streams from his subconscious into his incredibly competent hands, like dream, like race memory, like the spirit of earth herself, to create canvases which are transcendent and transformative. The art, sometimes both figurative and abstract at once, dances onto the page; no wonder he calls his pieces “emotionally hypnotic gestural works.” The artworks are authentic American originals.