“Looking at one of her paintings, you feel the same urgent and direct translation from sensation to form as one would in a de Kooning. They are not the same, of course; de Kooning's brush was guided more by the arabesque, or the figure eight. . . . Diamond's brush was more like a thrown knife or a karate chop.”
—David Salle, Artforum, December 2025
Martha Diamond, road trip, August 1968
MARTHA DIAMOND (1944-2023) conveyed 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 and Joan Mitchell, as well as Fairfield Porter and Alex Katz from its figurative wing.
Diamond’s next solo exhibition — her first in Europe — will open in September 2026 at the Sara Hildén Art Museum in Tampere, Finland. From July 2024 to May 2025 she was the subject of Martha Diamond: Deep Time, an exhibition organized by the Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville, Maine, and by The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut. Comprising paintings, monotypes and other works on paper, this focused survey proposed “deep time” as a new way of understanding her unique contribution to American painting. A monograph was published in connection with the exhibition by DelMonico Books / D.A.P.
She has also been featured in several group exhibitions in recent years, among them Looking Back/The 14th White Columns Annual, selected by Randy Kennedy at the New York alternative art space White Columns (2024), and Beautiful, Vivid, Self-contained, curated by David Salle at the Hill Art Foundation in New York (2023). In 2018 she was elected to the National Academy of Design. She was the subject of a three-decade survey at the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture in 2004, and in 2001 she received an Arts and Letters Award for Art from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Installation view, Alex Katz Foundation, Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Maine, 2024. From left: Philip Guston, Sunrise (1979); Martha Diamond, Central Character (1983). Photo: Hrag Vartanian / Hyperallergic
“Many of the works bring experiences and ideas from beyond Maine’s borders to Portland and the PMA, specifically reinforcing the deep connections between Maine and New York, two regions with longstanding connections to the artist. In Central Character by Martha Diamond, from 1983, the forms are immediately identifiable as skyscrapers and towering buildings. In many ways it seems outside the visual language of Maine, but it immediately establishes that Maine-New York connection.” —Shalini Le Gall, Chief Curator, Portland Museum of Art
Diamond served at various times as a visiting lecturer at Harvard University, as a visiting artist at the University of Pennsylvania and at the Yale Norfolk School of Art in Connecticut, as a guest artist at the Cooper Union School of Art in New York, and as an artist-in-residence at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation’s Learning Through Art program. Like many New York painters, she developed a long association with Maine, summering on Deer Isle, teaching at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and serving for 36 years on its Board of Governors. In 1988 she had a mid-career survey at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Brunswick, Maine, concurrent with a show of her prints at the nearby Portland Museum of Art. Her work was included the following year in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 1989 Biennial alongside that of Ross Bleckner, April Gornik, Brice Marden and Joel Shapiro; the exhibition catalogue celebrated her “spectral abstractions of the city, looming in a charged atmosphere enlivened by her free color sense.”
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 the late 1990s. She is currently represented by David Kordansky Gallery, which presented her most recent solo exhibition in New York in 2025, and by Thaddaeus Ropac. Her paintings and works on paper are in the permanent collection of numerous institutions, including the Brooklyn Museum, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of the City of New York, the Museum of Modern Art, the National Academy of Design and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, the Colby College Museum of Art, the Farnsworth Art Museum and the Portland Museum of Art in Maine; the Detroit Institute of Arts; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Minneapolis Institute of Art and the Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis; the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh; the High Museum of Art in Atlanta; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the San Antonio Museum of Art in Texas; the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Mo.; the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Cal.; the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin in Germany, and the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra. She is also represented in a number of corporate collections, including those of the Bank of America, the Cleveland Clinic, General Mills and JPMorgan Chase.
The Martha Diamond Trust
The Martha Diamond Trust is dedicated to preserving Diamond’s legacy and expanding knowledge of her art. Established by the artist in 2020 and based in New York, the Trust safeguards her archives and maintains an important collection of her work. We also collaborate with institutions and galleries and manage this website along with an Instagram feed and a periodic newsletter. The Trust is headed by:
Olivia Funk, Director
As director of the Martha Diamond Trust, Olivia Funk heads its core initiatives, facilitating research and fostering collaborations with museums, galleries and scholars to support the study and presentation of Diamond's work. She has helped organize museum exhibitions, gallery presentations and public programs while also developing a publications program and a robust social media presence.
Funk emphasizes the intellectual and perceptual dimensions of Diamond's paintings, highlighting how the artist translated the atmosphere of New York City into a distinct visual language. Through her leadership, the Trust has helped situate Diamond's work within the broader narratives of postwar and contemporary American painting. She studied art and art history and earned a BFA in studio art at Hunter College.
Lesley Raeside, Trustee
A native of Scotland, Lesley Raeside is a graduate of the Glasgow School of Art and a founding member of Transmission, one of the most influential artist-run galleries in the UK. Transmission's non-hierarchical structure and artist-led ethos became a model for similar initiatives throughout Europe, while the gallery itself has played a significant role in Glasgow's emergence as an internationally recognized center for contemporary art.
Raeside came to the United States through a scholarship to the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine and moved to New York City directly after. There she met and established a lasting friendship with Martha Diamond. She has shown her work with the National Exemplar Gallery in New York and Iowa City, 57W57Arts in New York and One Wall Gallery in Eugene, Oregon.
Frank Rose, Trustee
Frank Rose is an adjunct senior research scholar at Columbia University School of the Arts and a founding member of its Digital Storytelling Lab. A frequent speaker at film festivals, marketing conferences and academic seminars, he is the author of several books — most recently The Sea We Swim In, a guide to narrative thinking, and The Art of Immersion, a landmark work on technology and the evolution of narrative.
After receiving a BA in journalism from Washington & Lee University, Rose moved to New York and got his start covering the punk scene at CBGB for The Village Voice. Later he worked as a contributing editor at Esquire and Wired and a contributing writer at Fortune. He now writes on art for The New York Times and Blau International and contributes as well to The Wall Street Journal and other publications.
Please note that the Martha Diamond Trust does not authenticate works of art.
The Catalogue Raisonné
The Martha Diamond Trust is planning a catalogue raisonné of all known paintings, drawings and prints by the artist. We are currently gathering images of and information about artworks in public and private collections. We invite owners of works by Martha Diamond, as well as those who might have relevant information, to fill out this form.
All information about ownership of artworks will be kept confidential unless you grant us permission to publish it. Requests for anonymity will be respected. For inquiries on this or other subjects, please visit our contact page.