Meet Artist Joe Diggs

Micha’s Pond Grande Sunset (2022), 60″H x 50″W, oil on canvas.

Micha’s Over Blue Void (2021), 36″H x 48″W, acrylic and oil on canvas.

Artist Joe Diggs in his Osterville studio. Portrait by Russ Price.

Micha’s Pond Light (2023), 60″H x 40″W, oil on canvas.

Hemisphere (2022), 30″H x 40″W, oil on canvas.

Joe Diggs’s early life on the Cape was not all Topsiders and lobster rolls. A descendant of Cape Verdeans, he struggled with subtle racism and the accidental death of his older brother. For years, he says, he “wandered around like a zombie,” traveled the world, and felt understandable anger about the victims of violent racism he saw in the news, like Rodney King and James Byrd Jr. Through it all, three things kept him going: sports, his love of painting, and memories of a pond passed down by his grandfather.

Just after World War II, Diggs’s grandfather, also named Joe, had built a cluster of rental properties on one side of Micah’s Pond in Osterville and created a refuge there for people with darker complexions. Diggs remembers summers in his childhood when those cabins were full of Black families who returned every year and became his friends. “Swimming and games, people on the deck playing pinochle late at night, drinking and laughing and carrying on. Once they got to the property,” he says, “it was total freedom.”

Eventually Diggs concluded that he’d seen nothing in the world more beautiful than that pond, so he returned, took over the operations of the rental properties, and settled in to paint. “As an African American artist,” he says, “it’s easy to dwell on mistreatment. When I came back here, I realized that I have gold all around me—nothing but gems and jewels.”

When he looks out from his studio at the pond, he paints the various shapes he sees—leaves, branches, and tree trunks, and the spaces between them—and those shapes
become opportunities for him to dive into abstraction, “portals back and forth through history and time,” as he describes it, that sometimes reveal to him spirits and ancestors. “They’re always there.”

Diggs’s paintings show a lifetime of mastery, a deep awareness of color, and a rare ability to bare himself emotionally. In an art world often overburdened with concepts and theories, he goes to a deeper, better place, letting love, gratitude—and sometimes anger—flow out of his unconscious and onto the canvas. It’s a level of creative honesty that’s rare. “This place brought it out of me,” he says. “It’s where I can tell my truth. Every step is hallowed ground.”

Joe Diggs is represented by Berta Walker Gallery in Provincetown, bertawalker.com. To see more of his work, visit joediggsart.com.