Diamond Stingily is a great storyteller. The first time I met her, she came over to the loft where I was living during a snowstorm. She knew some of my roommates from Chicago, where they’d all gone to college and where Stingily is also from. I remember her standing up to reenact this time that she’d fallen over. I don’t really remember the story’s context, just her charisma and her knack for physical comedy. She pitched her body forward to explain how she’d flown through the air.
Around that time, Stingily’s gestural aptitude had also been spotlighted in Martine Syms’s exhibition “Vertical Elevated Oblique” at Bridget Donahue Gallery in New York. A video featuring Stingily, called Notes on Gesture (2015), was a focal point of the show. In front of a purple backdrop, Stingily performs an inventory of gestures. The press release explains, “The actor uses her body to quote famous, infamous, and unknown women.” Almost nine years later, this video remains pretty memorable to most people who were going to downtown Manhattan galleries then or who saw clips and images of it circulating online. Something about it really cut through the noise. It was an early installment in a continued collaboration between Stingily and Syms that includes the 2022 feature film African Desperate. Stingily stars in the dramedy as an MFA student finishing her final days at Bard.
I also saw Stingily give a reading in Brooklyn sometime around the Bridget Donahue show, part of a performance series curated by Kayla Guthrie. Stingily read from her school-age diary, again her storytelling genius on display. Also evident was a kind of anti-sentimental interest in ephemera from her younger years. The word “nostalgia” suggests a wistful affect that I don’t think quite captures Stingily’s sensibility. She possesses a straightforwardness that’s disarming.
The snowstorm, Martine’s video, and the reading were some of my encounters with Stingily and her work before I saw her sculptural practice, for which she’s arguably best known today. Maybe if I’d seen her sculptures without witnessing the reading from her school-age diary, I would’ve interpreted them differently. But this idea (or performance) of “young Diamond” is always present when I see her work, which often uses ready-mades, like the baseball bats and doors that make up her “Entryways.” I first saw a work from this series as a part of “Elephant Memory,” her solo exhibition at the New York City gallery Ramiken Crucible in 2016, and another one shortly thereafter in an exhibition about futurity at Lafayette Anticipations in Paris. (There are also three of these works in MoMA’s permanent collection.) The works are restrained in their sculptural language while inspiring a meditation on doors as portals of possibility. They are also based on a personal memory of Stingily’s grandmother’s home. Each work, with its leaning bat, conveys the potential for violence to come through an entryway. Monika Senz, senior director of Greene Naftali Gallery, where Stingily recently had the solo show “Sand,” underscores that “Diamond has this amazing quality to be very direct and clear while dealing with very complex issues.”
I’ve seen a lot of photos of Stingily over the years on Instagram. She has this way of narrating and annotating Sears family photos, cheerleading team photos, photos from when she worked at American Apparel. She can craft an entire world with a prodigious economy of words and sharp comedic timing. (In college, she studied creative writing, not studio art.) I think this storytelling instinct seems to come naturally to the artist, which is and isn’t in her sculptural work. Some visual artists use narrative more literally than she does. Stingily uses objects, like a shelf of trophies or a swing set, for example, to tell a story about herself, but there’s also a confidence in the language of objects to speak for themselves. Her practice still includes other mediums, like writing and acting, that operate according to a more conventional idea of narrative. But her sculptures take advantage of the way objects tell stories in a different way. The success with which she can shift between these different mediums almost belies the nuanced skill that this takes.
Stingily’s approach to visual art sometimes challenges the overwrought conventions that its criticism frequently leans on to make sense of work: interpreting symbols, academic references, and biographical intentionality. Reviewing Stingily’s show “Kaas” (the press release quotes Kaa, the snake from The Jungle Book), which took place at Queer Thoughts, New York, in 2016, Robert McKenzie described her methodology as “one of provocation rather than pedagogy.” His interpretation was based on Stingily telling him: “I don’t think the artist’s intentions should be explained through words but with the artist’s work and the reaction of the viewer.” McKenzie called the show, which featured snaking braids of Kanekalon hair spotlighted through a fairly minimalist white-box installation, “precise, potent, and wonderfully lyrical,” which fulfilled him in a way he described as a “genuine relief.”
Soon after, an “epic version,” to borrow Johanna Fateman’s words, of the same braid sculpture Kaas (Punishment) (2019) “cut through three floors” of the New Museum as part of “Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon” in 2017. These early New York City shows of Stingily’s struck a nerve with people, earning her bigger and bigger platforms.
Death has been a subject that Stingily has returned to over the years. For her first exhibition in Chicago in 2014, the artist simulated her own funeral service, staging a window display featuring an arrangement of objects, including vases of flowers, funeral programs, candies in a dish, and a lace table runner. She also wrote an obituary-inspired poem. Called “Forever in our Hearts,” the mortality-focused debut was commissioned by artist Jade Kuriki-Olivo (formerly Puppies Puppies) at the project space Eggg. Speaking about the work in a video from 2018, Stingily said: “Death can encourage you to conquer your fears in life and do what you got to do now. We’re all going to die, so you might as well get over that shy shit.” Stingily tells the truth, and she’s funny.
One of the reasons Stingily’s work is successful is that she knows who she is. Even if it’s not directly incorporated in her sculptural work, her practice of telling stories about herself, of connecting herself in the present moment to lore related to her childhood and her family, creates a groundedness, which I think is an essential element of being an impactful storyteller and artist.
The last time I talked to Stingily more than just “Hey, what’s up,” it was at a celebration of life for a friend we shared who’d passed away. It was the first time I’d seen her since she’d also lost her mother and grandmother not that long before. I couldn’t help but see her recent show at Greene Naftali, “Sand” (2024), through the lens of grief. The largest work was a long jump pitch over fifty feet long with partially buried bronze casts of hands, feet, knees, and arms. There were other “sandboxes” made of plywood, also with these bronze casts. I felt somber looking at them.
The work of Stingily that the Whitney Museum of American Art has in their collection is a black-and-white single-channel video called How Did He Die (2016). It borrows footage from a 1967 documentary directed by Bess Lomax Hawes showing little girls chanting a schoolyard rhyme: “My mother died / How did she die? / She died like this / She died like this.” The rhyme is then repeated with different family members switched out for “Mother.” Stingily projects the clip on/through a chain link fence. There was a chain link fence in “Sand” as well. In a smaller room, apart from the sandboxes of bronze body parts, there was an installation you couldn’t enter but only peer at because this fence separated you. On the walls of the smaller room, pink curtains were hung, and a pair of gold lamps flanked a framed photograph of a funeral home featuring the same décor reproduced in the gallery space: the pink curtains and gold lamps. The fact I could only look but not enter this room reminded me that my understanding of Stingily has limitations.
Later I found a review by Olamiju Fajemisin which describes how Stingily’s exhibition “I’m Not Coming Back Here” (2023) at Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin, “upset the erotics of observation.” Fajemisin offers a psychoanalytical interpretation — that the household objects the artist uses “serve as literal and spiritual thresholds or boundaries.” She contends that the interplay between inhibiting and encouraging looking yields an uncertainty to the viewer, “seeming to allow glimpses of the artist’s memories but finally denying access to them.”
The press release for “Sand” includes a passage handwritten and photocopied in a bubbly cursive that reminds me of passing notes in elementary school. It reads:
All people talk about some days how tired they are, how busy they are how tired they are how busy they are how tired they are how busy they are how tired they are how busy they are.
Everyone is so busy.
Everyone is so tired. And I’m up to nothing!
I wanted to meet Stingily and talk to her about her work before I wrote this, but I don’t think she had time. I texted Ebony L. Haynes, curator of Stingily’s next big show, opening in June at the David Zwirner-affiliated gallery space 52 Walker, where Haynes is also senior director. I didn’t follow up again for a quote because it’s true: everyone is so busy, and everyone is so tired.
I was worried maybe I would get the work wrong. But now I think what’s more important is me knowing the limits of my knowledge. I feel in the work that Diamond Stingily knows herself. More than knowing what something means, isn’t that what we want to feel from art?
