“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
Alex Katz, Martha, 1981. Oil on linen. 60 x 48 in.
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’s second-largest city. She was recently the subject of Martha Diamond: Deep Time, an exhibition organized by the Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville, Maine, where it debuted in July 2024, and by The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut, where it was on view until May 2025. Comprising paintings, monotypes and other works on paper, this focused survey of her career 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, 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. She 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.
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
Like many New York painters, Diamond 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 noted that her “spectral abstractions of the city, looming in a charged atmosphere enlivened by her free color sense,” were now accompanied by “true abstractions [such as] the terse vector of color that comprises Red Light.”
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 David Kordansky Gallery, which presented her most recent solo exhibition in New York in 2025, and by Thaddaeus Ropac gallery, which is planning a solo show of her work for 2027 in Paris. 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 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.
Work in Progress: The Catalogue Raisonné
The Martha Diamond Trust, established by the artist in 2020, maintains an archive of material related to the artist and her work and is planning a catalogue raisonné of all known paintings, prints and drawings. The Trust is gathering images and data on artworks by Martha Diamond in private and public collections. We invite owners of works by Martha Diamond, as well as anyone else who may 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 other subjects, please visit our contact page.
The Martha Diamond website and Instagram feed are maintained by the Martha Diamond Trust, a private trust created by the artist and based in New York. We manage Martha Diamond’s archive and are dedicated to preserving her legacy and expanding knowledge of her work. Olivia Funk, director; Lesley Raeside and Frank Rose, trustees. All Martha Diamond artworks copyright © the Martha Diamond Trust.
The Martha Diamond Trust does not authenticate works of art.