Working primarily across painting, Diamond is best known for her sweeping abstractions of the New York City skyline. She was seduced by the skyscrapers, and used thick, frenetic brushstrokes to render the contours of the city’s architecture in vibrant colors and varying textures. A prominent member of the New York School and the downtown poetry scene alongside John Giorno and Peter Schjeldahl, she found inspiration in artists such as Joan Mitchell, Jackson Pollock, and Franz Kline.
Solo exhibitions have included The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut, David Kordansky Gallery, and Magenta Plains in New York. The artist’s work has also been featured in group shows at Anton Kern Gallery, Karma, and the Whitney Museum’s 1984 “MetaManhattan” show, as well as its 1989 Biennial. Diamond’s work is a part of collections at the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Guggenheim Museum, among others.
“What Frank Auerbach did for Camden Town, and Monet did for Paris, and De Chirico did for piazzas all over Italy, Diamond did for Manhattan,” wrote Jonathan Griffin in the New York Times in 2024. “None of these artists were bothered with assiduous documentation of the built environment so much as with conveying how it felt to them.”
