”I just want to show what I see every day.”
We met American artist Diamond Stingily, whose talents span many spheres of art: From poetry to performance, from sculpture to installation, and from literature to video.
”I make work about my experiences as a person. I happen to be American, and I’m clearly also Black.”
”I guess one of the reasons why I’m showing fences is because it’s a very feminine idea to me. In certain ways, I’m a guarded person. Maybe that’s why I’m interested in fences at the moment.”
Diamond Stingily is a multi-media artist and writer who explores themes of memory, identity, settings, timelines, and the difference between city and rural living. Beginning her career as a performance artist, Stingily’s practice now encompasses sculpture, installation, and poetry. By combining and altering everyday materials, she transforms them into evocative works imbued with commemorative power. Mundane objects become fragments of memory, charged with symbolic meaning that reflect broader narratives of American culture and politics.
”I don’t think my goal is to change the world. I don’t think that’s my purpose while I’m here. If someone thinks that art is changing the world, it is good for them. I don’t think my art is doing that. It can maybe influence some people that inspire some people, but the world is gonna do what it wants to do with or without me.”
Stingily is one of her generation’s most important artists, and her work has been featured prominently in numerous esteemed international exhibitions. Three of her highly acclaimed Entryways pieces were acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York and installed for over a year as part of their permanent collection display. Memory and identity are recurring themes in Stingily’s work, and some of her most powerful explorations of the boundaries between private and public spaces have not been objects but textual or dialogic works. Given Stingiley’s background in literature, her artistic practice relates deeply to poetry and language.
Diamond Stingily (b. 1990) was raised in Chicago, IL, and currently lives in Brooklyn, New York. She studied creative writing at Columbia College and published the book Love Diamond in 2013. She started her artistic career as a performance artist and has collaborated with Martine Syms through the video work Notes on Gesture (2015) and later starred in the movie The African Desper¬ate (2022). In 2015, Stingily debuted with the solo exhibition Diamond Stingily: Forever in Our Hearts at the project space Egg, Chicago, IL, and in 2018, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Mi¬ami, presented her first institutional exhibition, Diamond Stingily: Life in My Pocket.
Stingily’s work has been featured in prominent group exhibitions, including The Shed’s Open Call and P.S.1 MoMA’s Greater New York, further cementing her reputation as an artist whose practice is both timely and timeless. Her work has been presented in solo exhibitions at Kunstverein München, Munich, Germany (2019); CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco, CA (2019); Project Row Houses, Houston, TX, and in group exhibitions at institutions including Kode Bergen Art Museum, Bergen, Norway (2024); Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany (2023); Museum of Mod¬ern Art, New York, NY (2022); Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Vaduz, Liechtenstein (2022); Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA (2022); New Museum, New York, NY (2021); National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia (2020); NS-Documentation Center, Munich, Germany (2020); Swiss Institute, New York, NY (2019); and Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Detroit, MI (2017).
Stingily’s work is owned by a multitude of prominent public and private institutions and collections around the world, including the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL; KADIST, San Francisco, CA and Paris, France; Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Vaduz, Liech¬tenstein; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany; Rubell Museum, Miami and Washington D.C.; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; and National Gal¬lery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia.
Diamond Stingily was interviewed by Marc-Christoph Wagner in February 2025. The interview took place at Peder Lund Gallery in Oslo, Norway, on the occasion of her exhibition Diamond Stingily: diamond.
Camera: Vegard Landsverk
Edit: Signe Boe Pedersen
Producer: Marc-Christoph Wagner
Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2025
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