The Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden presents the largest museum installation to date by American Conceptual artist Jessica Diamond. Wheel Of Life fills the Hirshhorn’s second-floor inner-circle galleries with 15 text-and-image-based artworks to highlight the inventive nature of the artist’s practice.
Diamond emerged in New York’s downtown art scene in the 1980s. Adopting language as her primary medium, the artist critiques contemporary American life, particularly commercialism, corporate culture, and media. Literature also serves as a continual touchstone, with references in Wheel Of Life to Henry David Thoreau’s Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854), Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (1865), and James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). She presents 13 new wall drawings in dialogue with two preexisting works to reveal, in what she refers to as “poetical texts” and symbols, her meditation on spending more than 40 years as a working artist. The artist joins Laurie Anderson and Barbara Kruger in presenting text-based work made for the Museum.
Diamond’s exhibition is also the subject of a suite of videos embedded in the Museum’s award-winning self-guiding smartphone platform, Hirshhorn Eye (Hi) . Designed to enrich Wheel Of Life for broad audiences, these new Hi shorts are voiced by individuals of many ages. Hi activates the Museum’s second-floor inner-circle galleries by prompting engagement with the artist’s richly coded self-reflections, inviting visitors to linger and share their reflections on @Hirshhorn.
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Printed copies and a braille version are available at the Museum
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Jessica Diamond was born in 1957 in New York City, where she continues to live and work. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the School of Visual Arts, New York, in 1979 and a Master of Fine Arts degree from Columbia University in 1981. Diamond has appeared in many international exhibitions, including the Lyon Biennale, Lyon, France (2015); Sonsbeek 9, Arnhem, the Netherlands (2001); and Aperto, Venice Biennale, Italy (1993). Solo exhibitions include El Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Seville, Spain (2011); Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Canada (2002); and Stedelijk Museum Het Domein, Sittard, the Netherlands (1999). The artist participated in Infotainment, a traveling exhibition at Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago; Aspen Art Museum, Colorado, and other venues (1985), and the Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City (1991). Diamond is the recipient of several awards, including the National Endowment for the Arts Award in 1989, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship Award in 2000, and the Anonymous Was A Woman Award in 2004.
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