^{Joe Diggs in front of his painting Joe’s at Sea (2020, oil on canvas) Courtesy of PAAM and
Berta Walker Gallery.}

Artist Joe Diggs Reflects at the Berta Walker Gallery

by Steve Desroches

This midsummer, looking around Provincetown it’s easy to find the artistic impact of Joe Diggs. His work is on the walls at the esteemed Berta Walker Gallery, and the Provincetown Art Association and Museum (PAAM) is home to a mid-career survey of his work. Last week Diggs came from his home in Osterville, a village in Barnstable, to install a work of public art on MacMillan Pier in partnership with the Provincetown Public Art Foundation, and he is teaching a course at the Fine Arts Work Center, where he’ll also deliver a public lecture. Capping all these achievements, Diggs was also named the Artist of the Year for 2025 by the Arts Foundation of Cape Cod. It’s a time of celebration, but also one of intense work for Diggs that can’t help elicit a bit of reflection on where he’s been, the art he’s produced, and where both he and his craft are going from here. 

His voice is buoyant and kind, with a bit of exuberance, yet clear, as he explains this moment in time.

“I started making decisions that I should have been making years earlier,” says Diggs. “Ownership is really what it’s all about, and loving a body of work and standing by it.”

With ancestral roots on Cape Cod that date back to the 1800s, it’s this peninsula with its disproportionately large arts community, bulging at the Cape tip with the Provincetown art colony, that inspired Diggs to pursue life as an artist. While a student at Barnstable High School, frequent field trips to Provincetown to visit PAAM and the town’s art galleries proved to make a lasting impression on Diggs. Living on his family’s compound in Osterville overlooking Micah’s Pond, the Cape is part of the lifeblood of his work. “First of all, love of place is huge,” says Diggs. “I’m an Army brat. I was born in France and lived in Germany and Hawaii. But it was always my family’s desire to go home. We always talked about what we were going to do once we got back to Cape Cod.” 

And now as a respected and celebrated artist himself, with a long legacy of participating in the artistic conversation on the Cape and in Provincetown, Diggs says he can’t express it enough how important the town has been to him and his work.

“Let’s face it, as a local artist if you can’t be appreciated locally then it’s harder to achieve that nationally,” says Diggs. “And Provincetown exposes you to the world.”

With a wide array of subject matter, style, and approaches, Diggs’ work is perhaps best known for his use of bold colors, shapes, and forms that give his work a vibration and bursts of energy. He states that while he works he is “intensely in control without force,” meaning that his focus is committed, but not rigid, allowing for improvisation and for new ideas to make themselves known on impulse. There’s a responsibility to the creative process that he’s worked into his own practice. But so, too, is there a devotion to family, culture, and heritage. 

Being part of a multi-generational Cape Cod family of African-American and Cape Verdean descent, the genealogical and social legacy can often inform his work. Being a part of a minority community that has often been “moved” or “stolen,” creating an anchor on the Cape is important, especially since communities of color in the region have consistently been left out of the narrative in real time and erased from the historical record. As an artist, Diggs has more questions than ever. And in these times with authoritarianism, bigotry, and fear as control on the rise, his continual quest to find answers to his questions remains resolute. In times like these the most radical action an artist can take might be to be oneself more fully and unapologetically than ever. Don’t get distracted by the noise, and certainly don’t be silent, but let the contribution be a reflection rather than a reaction. 

With his installation on MacMillan Pier Diggs presents a painting of the water at Herring Cove Beach at sunset, with brilliant splashes of red, orange, and yellow. But there’s a narrative element to the piece, and parts are inspired by the recent spasm of hate incidents in town, prompting Diggs to add the phrase, “Pray the hate away.” While he’s not a religious person, it’s his meditation on this age of anxiety and tension, but without abandoning hope and personal power, something that permeates all his work.

“It’s about telling my own stories,” says Diggs. “It’s about being fully in the moment.”

Recent works by Joe Diggs is on exhibition at the Berta Walker Gallery, 208 Bradford St., July 25 – August 17, with an opening reception planned for Friday, July 25, 5 – 7 p.m. For more information call 508.487.6411 or visit bertawalker.com. Joe Diggs: Evolving Circles is on exhibition at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum (PAAM) 460 Commercial St., now through September 7. For more information call 508.487.1750 or visit paam.org.