VENICE.- Two American painters with very different approaches to abstraction will take over neighboring spaces at Castello 925 this fall, offering visitors a pair of exhibitions that move between memory, color, geometry and the physical experience of painting.
Opening during the same week and running from September 24 through November 22, 2026, Joe Diggs: In Venice and Whitney Hagen: Chromatic Conditions form part of Castello 925's program alongside the 61st Venice Biennale. Both exhibitions respond, in their own ways, to the Biennale's theme, In Minor Keys. An opening reception for the shows is scheduled for Saturday, September 26.
The similarities largely end there.
For Joe Diggs, abstraction emerges from memory, family history and the textures of everyday life. The Cape Cod-based artist has long been known for figurative paintings rooted in his family and the African American community, but the Venice exhibition reveals another side of his practice: a world of color, pattern and layered forms that suggest woven surfaces and accumulated experience.
Diggs' paintings can move easily between the personal and the expansive. Some are large and densely worked; others are deliberately modest, painted on such ordinary objects as fast-food containers. Poker scores and handwritten "notes to self" appear among the marks, transforming materials that might otherwise be discarded into records of lived time. The exhibition describes these abstractions as carrying a kind of spiritual memory of traditional woven surfaces.
That willingness to move between formats is characteristic of an artist whose work has never remained within a single visual language. Diggs has made figurative paintings dealing with African American history and personal family memories, gestural plein-air landscapes and geometric abstractions. His work can range from wall-sized murals to intimate pieces on cardboard.
Works reproduced with the exhibition materials underline that range. The Past (2024) is crowded with repeated patterns, circular motifs and woven-looking passages in bright yellows, reds and greens, while an Untitled painting from 2025 brings together overlapping elliptical and linear forms against fields of saturated color. Other works push toward more gestural territory, demonstrating just how difficult it is to reduce Diggs' practice to a single style.
The artist and critic Seph Rodney has described that variety through a cosmic metaphor, suggesting that any single Diggs painting represents only one part of a much larger visual universe.
Diggs has generational roots on Cape Cod, where his work remains closely connected to local history and community. Recent solo exhibitions have included the Provincetown Art Association & Museum and Berta Walker Gallery in 2025, Holderness School in New Hampshire the same year, and earlier presentations at the Brattleboro Museum and Cotuit Center for the Arts. In 2025, the Arts Foundation of Cape Cod named him Artist of the Year. He is represented by Berta Walker Gallery. READ MORE
