J Diamond Volume 46.1
HAIRTIE I NECKLACE of nickel-plated brass, freshwater pearls, powder coat, found synthetic hair, silk; pendant 30.1 x 7.6 x 3.8 centimeters, 71.1 centimeters circumference, 2024. Photographs by the artist.
J TARAN DIAMOND.
With a twinkle in her eye, J Taran Diamond declares, “Anybody can build something, but it takes a real artist to put plastic on it.” Composed of knotted strings of freshwater pearls covered with powder coating, pierced strips of silver and brass plated with twenty-four karat gold, and colorful braided hair extensions, Diamond’s work is a vibrant mix of materials rich with meaning and unexpected layers. She is intrigued by how objects can represent experiences, and acknowledges, “I never set out to make work that is autobiographical, but I find that I almost always do.”
Diamond’s attraction to craft started at a young age. She shares, “My mom makes quilts. She taught me how to sew when I was five or six,” musing, “I think that is why I became an artist.” This early influence is reflected in the abundance of stitches and fiber references in Diamond’s work. She also recalls that her mother would present quilts to family and friends for most any occasion, which led her to see making as a means of connecting with other people. Diamond’s goal with sewing, however, was garments. In her first year at Central Texas College, she even majored in costume design. But, after taking a jewelry class, her professor, Wynona Alexander, recognized her talent and declared, “you know you are majoring in this, right?” Alexander helped Diamond transfer to the University of North Texas, where she completed her BFA in metalsmithing and jewelry. While Diamond loves metal, she still often approaches her work in terms of textiles and fashion, considering how she would construct something if it were made of fabric or thinking about what she creates “as a thing wearing a costume.”
GALLANTRY TOOK ITS LAST BOW (JAMES CAMAK) of steel, leather, waxed thread, 3.8 x 6.4 x 66.0 centimeters, 2023.
When Diamond moved from Texas to Athens, Georgia, to pursue her MFA at the University of Georgia (UGA) in 2020, she was struck by the omnipresence of anti-blackness in the material culture of the Deep South. “I don’t think anyone would say they don’t have racism in Texas; the extent to which that is not true is laughable. But they don’t have old buildings really.” In Georgia, though, she would “pass multiple sites of enslavement on [her] daily commute.” Diamond grew up in Germany—her mother is German, her father in the military—and understands that “there’s a very specific and significant history of racial violence in Germany that they think about and talk about very differently than they do in the South.” She built her thesis work around her experiences in the South as a Black person descended from enslaved people. For example, Gallantry Took Its Last Bow presented five diptychs based on decorative ironwork from historic sites of enslavement; Diamond described it in her thesis: “A badge and a branding iron for each site prompt viewers to consider who is afforded dignity by each object and who is afforded dignity by each site, as well as interrogating who is afforded the option to mark themselves and who is simply marked.”
As a graduate student Diamond was a leader in the recently formed UGA Black Artists’ Alliance, and she continues to be an advocate for Black people in the fields of craft and academia as a Teaching Fellow and Studio Manager at the Baltimore Jewelry Center and as an adjunct at local colleges. She acknowledges, though, that now is “not a great funding climate for anything involving dismantling” of systemic racism, adding with a wry grimace, “I think [the current administration is] focusing more of that funding on mantling harder.” However, she does “try to be vocal about the fact that a lot of people have biases that they might not be aware of” and to teach in places that are accessible. She serves on the exhibitions and residents selection committees at the Baltimore Jewelry Center, and while she does not believe that racially biased scoring has ever been a problem there, she is committed to “making sure that we’re using the platform that our organization provides to artists in a way that feels aligned with what is important to us.”
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Diamond started her body of work titled Tenderheaded (2022-23) during an Emerging Artist Residency at the Baltimore Jewelry Center one summer while in graduate school. She planned to use the time to focus on her thesis, but less than a month before the residency started, a temporary brain injury (from a wreck following the acute onset of COVID while she was driving) prevented her from doing any serious reading or writing. Instead, she spent her time in Baltimore delighting in the rainbow- hued hair extensions—often viewed as campy and associated with queer culture—that she encountered while touring the city’s many beauty supply stores. She believes that “hair has the potential to be very masculinizing or very feminizing… especially for queer Black people.” Wearing braids herself, she explains, “changed the way that I understand my body and the way that I understand my identity and the way that I am perceived. And that experience really stuck with me, and I started making work about it.” The finely crafted and elegantly composed monochromatic works in Tenderheaded present the flamboyantly colored materials with dignity and appreciation.
In her current body of work, Invert, Diamond continues to use hair while adding pearls and pierced metal elements. Now she focuses on found hair, intrigued by the idea of the lost braid or track weave. “When I know that it belonged to someone before it was a piece of jewelry, it’s different than when it’s something I bought.” Baltimore is a majority Black city with a lot of people wearing braids or weaves, so she finds plenty of lost hair extensions on the ground. And friends sometimes find hair for her—“I tell people that I am always willing to accept it, but I am never going to ask for it, because I am aware that the hair is gross when I first find it.” (She repeatedly washes, sterilizes and frequently dyes the hair before using it to make jewelry.) Another change is that she now often presents the hair as untidy. Of the Tangle series (part of Invert), she wrote, “I’ve been thinking a lot lately about identity as something that isn’t always clear or clean. Often, it’s something complicated, maybe even a bit of a mess…There is nothing to these objects except for the mess, for the entanglement of distinct and contrasting elements.”
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Diamond explains name of this new body of work: “The term ‘invert’ stems from the now-discredited theory of sexual inversion and refers to queer individuals. The theory posited that all human beings had inborn gendered traits or natures, and queerness was the result of those traits’ reversal. To be inverted can suggest not only a state of reversal, but to be turned inside out.” Diamond uses layering to turn “imitation pearls inside-out,” so that “rather than coating plastic beads with a surface to emulate pearls, pearls are coated with a surface to emulate plastic beads.” Also, she powder coats plated metals, enjoying the push and pull of “taking a thing made of brass, which is not fake gold, but not not fake gold,” plating it with actual gold, and then covering it in glossy clear plastic—each layer further complicating any obvious understanding of what is real.
The necklace Imposter I includes gold-plated ribbons of hearts, some cut from brass and some from sterling silver, which raises the question of whether some of the hearts are more gold than others. Diamond began making pieces for Invert around the time she started medically transitioning and notes that she was “specifically interested in the idea of an object pretending to be the thing that it already is, because that was sort of where I was at in my own experience.”
Diamond scatters hearts throughout her work and favors wearing heart jewelry herself. The shape intrigues her; she describes it as “the only one of the basic shapes that we assume as having a gender… feminine.” She is interested in investigating what it means to embrace this form that is filled with contradictions; society loves hearts, but considers them as cliché, views them as both filled with emotions and vapid. Hearts can convey more than other shapes, making them an ideal motif for Diamond’s evocative work about identity and legitimacy, “plus the repeating [heart] pattern is just very sexy.”
GALLANTRY TOOK ITS LAST BOW (THOMAS JEFFERSON) of steel, leather, waxed thread, 6.4 x 6.4 x 66.0 centimeters, 2023.
SUGGESTED READING
Callahan, Ashley. “queerphoria: Otherness and Ourselves.” Ornament: Vol. 43, No. 3, 2022: 42-47.
Diamond, J Taran. “An Inheritance in Two Parts,” MFA thesis, University of Georgia, 2023, https://www.jdiamondmetalsmith.com/_files/ugd/44762c_379d9ee341434ab6ae2b4eae3c9ee2ff.pdf.
Diamond, J Taran. “Soft in the Water: The Pearl as Queer Material,” Current Obsession (October 2024), https://current-obsession.com/soft-in-the-water-1-2/
Ashley Callahan is an independent scholar and curator in Athens, Georgia, with a specialty in modern and contemporary American decorative arts. She has an undergraduate degree from Sewanee and a Master’s degree in the history of American decorative arts from the Smithsonian and Parsons. She particularly appreciated the deep regard J Diamond has for her fellow jewelry artists. Diamond’s most treasured objects include a necklace from her friend Margo Csipo; she is giddy about a new ring (a heart!) from Erica Bello; and one of her proudest accomplishments was a recent solo exhibition at Dransfield Jewelers in Richmond, Virginia, because the invitation came from people she respects and admires and it was attended by people she respects and admires. Diamond also provided helpful advice for collectors hesitant to acquire jewelry that tells someone else’s story: “I don’t think that it is ever inappropriate to support an artist by buying their work, regardless of whether that work is directly descriptive of your experience or not.”
