J A M I E D I A M O N D

So inspired by my dear friend Sanford Biggers @sanfordbiggers artist talk with @ernicorinne and the opening of Drift at the Parrish Museum. It was a powerful testament to just how brilliant and important his work is. If you're anywhere near the East End this summer, this is a show you need to see. The night ended with an unexpected reunion with a student from 16 years ago. Grateful for evenings like this 🖤 @parrishart #SanfordBiggers #Drift #ParrishArtMuseum

Come hang with us in our studios and see what we have been up to! Stop by anytime on Sunday May 17th 3-7pm. DM for address, out east in Long Island. #openstudio #jamiediamond #normparis #jackiehoving #art

There is nothing quite like a generative, engaging conversation with someone whose work you deeply admire and which also resonates with your own. Sitting with anthropologist Heather Paxton @heather.paxson of MIT @mitshass last night, I was struck by how we are drawn to similar subjects, motherhood, the line between the authentic and the constructed, and the way people perform identity through the everyday practices of caregiving. Thank you to everyone who joined us, the questions you brought made the conversation richer and more expansive Thank you @mammazappa @odivse and the @gardnermuseum for organizing this event.

One of those magical semesters❤️‍🩹 endlessly inspired by my students @upennphotography @uofpenn

Celebrate Mother's Day at @gardnermuseum with @mit_anthropology professor Heather Paxson and artist @jamiediamond . "The Motherhood Exchange" is being held Thursday, May 7 at 7 pm. Learn more and get tickets at the link in our bio.

6 years ago we gave birth during the height of the global pandemic. Such a confluence of emotions. Happy birthday to my beautiful girl. I am so proud to be your mama. In my bio you will find this heart-wrenching documentary short, directed and edited by Sam Vladimirsky @sam_vladimirsky who takes viewers back to mid-March 2020, when Diamond was 7.5 months pregnant and due to give birth in New York City, amidst the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Today marks nine years since becoming a mother. I find myself returning to an earlier series I began during my son’s first year when everything felt exciting, overwhelming, and unknown. Working from an album I found in Berlin, with images of a mother and child from 1938, I restaged those moments collapsing time and weaving together two maternal narratives separated by nearly eight decades. Happy birthday, Judd, thank you for making me a mother 🤍

Very excited to share this recent profile piece in @lampoonmagazine written by Sara Van Bussel @__anticamera Jamie Diamond stages fictional families to challenge photographic truth FROM CRAIGSLIST CASTING TO JAPAN’S RENTAL RELATIONSHIP SERVICES, JAMIE DIAMOND HIRES STRANGERS TO STAGE FAMILIES AND PAID INTERACTIONS, DOCUMENTING CONSTRUCTED INTIMACY HOW JAMIE DIAMOND CHALLENGES PHOTOGRAPHIC TRUTH THROUGH CONSTRUCTED FAMILY PORTRAITS AND STAGED IDENTITIES See full article link in bio

After about five years, this work has come down. Thank you @kinamoeller for this wonderful opportunity. This body of work emerged from a desire to dismantle the portrait and examine what lies beneath its surface. Rather than presenting a subject, I focus on the constructed environments where portraits traditionally occur, spaces loaded with aesthetic, psychological, and cultural expectation. By removing the figure and stripping the image of narrative cues, I draw attention to the portrait as a performative site, where identity is not just captured but staged.Using studio-lit faux wood veneers, I build deliberately artificial, portrait-ready spaces that function as both visual clichés and theatrical backdrops. These empty sets serve as stand-ins for authenticity, calling into question the mechanisms of image-making and the illusion of intimacy. The resulting photographs, devoid of human presence, become meditations on absence, potential, and the artifice of self-representation. These sets are scaled to the human body, inviting the viewer to physically and psychologically inhabit the space, the viewer becomes the subject: their presence completing the composition, their gaze activating the image.

Persona PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE RE-IMAGINED SELF February 19 - May 10, 2026 Hostetter Gallery, @gardnermuseum This exhibition was co-curated by Pieranna Cavalchini, Tom and Lisa Blumenthal Curator of Contemporary Art, and Melissa Harris, Editor-at-Large of Aperture Foundation. It features works by: Hakeem Adewumi, Azra Akšamija, Claude Cahun, Sophie Calle, María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Cao Fei, Jamie Diamond, John Dugdale, Samuel Fosso, Lina Geoushy, Kahn & Selesnick (Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick), Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley, John Kelly, Shigeyuki Kihara, Şükran Moral, Mariko Mori, Yasumasa Morimura, Zanele Muholi, Narcissister, Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp, Tomoko Sawada, Cindy Sherman, Yinka Shonibare, Tseng Kwong Chi, Wang Qingsong, Gillian Wearing, Carrie Mae Weems, and David Wojnarowicz I Promise to be a Good Mother I assume the role of subject and photographer and put on the mask of motherhood, dressing up in my mother’s clothes and interacting with a reborn doll. The mother is sometimes awkward, sometimes distant, sometimes visibly uncertain, and above all imperfect. I resist the dominant ideal of maternal perfection and allow the imperfections to remain visible. This work confronts the myths of maternal idealization, which are drawn from a long tradition of image-making. Historically, the mother figure, most often depicted through the male gaze, was heavily romanticized. I position my work within that lineage while deliberately complicating it, exposing the everyday anxieties and expectations.

When I was invited to produce a new work for the façade of the @gardnermuseum , I found myself thinking about the space between imagining and becoming, and what it actually looks and feels like to inhabit the role of mother. I was reflecting on my past and present selves, the distance between my former persona and my life now as a mother. Motherhood, for me, is marked by both struggle and tenderness, fear and resilience, imperfection and endurance. This image emerged directly from that lived reality. While I was posing with the reborn doll, my own children instinctively entered the frame, reaching for me in a simple desire to connect and be close. In that unscripted moment, just as their touch disrupted the pose, the photograph was taken, capturing not a staged ideal, but a fleeting convergence of chaos, vulnerability, love, and strength. it was such an honor to be in dialogue last night with @hakeemthedreem and @therealnarcissister the conversation was inspiring and generative. Thank you to everyone at the Gardner Museum for all that you do. The exhibition Persona: Photography and the ReImagined Self is up until May 10, 2026

Honored to be included in this historic exhibition in the company of my art heroes Persona: Photography and the Re-Imagined Self February 19 - May 10, 2026 Hostetter Gallery @gardnermuseum This exhibition was co-curated by Pieranna Cavalchini, Tom and Lisa Blumenthal Curator of Contemporary Art, and Melissa Harris, Editor-at-Large of Aperture Foundation. It features works by: Hakeem Adewumi, Azra Akšamija, Claude Cahun, Sophie Calle, María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Cao Fei, Jamie Diamond, John Dugdale, Samuel Fosso, Lina Geoushy, Kahn & Selesnick (Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick), Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley, John Kelly, Shigeyuki Kihara, Şükran Moral, Mariko Mori, Yasumasa Morimura, Zanele Muholi, Narcissister, Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp, Tomoko Sawada, Cindy Sherman, Yinka Shonibare, Tseng Kwong Chi, Wang Qingsong, Gillian Wearing, Carrie Mae Weems, and David Wojnarowicz In this series, I perform the role of mother for the camera with a life like reborn doll. The familiar visual codes, like tenderness, bodily proximity, and domestic spaces carry narratives, assumptions and expectations. Yet we play roles every day. As a child, I was conscious of those roles, especially the role of "mother." I remember vividly watching my own mother slip in and out of character. Her performance of motherhood and the labor that went into the role was palpable even then. It was clear that she, like so many of us, was trying to live up to an idea, a version of motherhood shaped by societal conditioning and cultural expectations. But we are human. We are flawed. And eventually, the mask slips. This project was born from one of those moments when my mother’s mask came off and I saw her not as a mother, but as a woman. At eight years old, I wrote a letter to my future adult self outlining how I would do things differently. That letter became the seed from which this character and this series grew.