Jessica Diamond: Wheel Of Life

The Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden will present the largest museum installation to date by American conceptual artist Jessica Diamond. “Wheel Of Life” will fill 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 will present 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 Hirshhorn Eye videos embedded in the museum’s award-winning self-guiding smartphone platform. Designed to enrich “Wheel Of Life” for broad audiences, these new Hirshhorn Eye (Hi) shorts are voiced by individuals of many ages. Hi will activate 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.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website