2025 Arts Foundation of Cape Cod Artist of the Year recipient Joe Diggs has spent decades perfecting his craft, all while taking time to give back to his community. Joe’s work shows the power that art can have in provoking thought, stimulating conversation, and enacting change when it comes to issues tied to identity, race, history, place, and family. Joe has taught art to teens involved in the juvenile justice system on Cape Cod. He teaches classes at both the Fine Arts Work Center (FAWC) as well as the Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill and has taught at the Cotuit Center for the Arts and Cultural Center of Cape Cod.

“His work is raw, emotional, and deeply personal while also resonating universally.” Julia Cumes.

Time is at the center of Diggs’s paintings, which refuses to sit neatly in one moment, place, or mood. His work is about how history — both his family’s and all Black Americans’ — permeates the present. His paintings go back and forth between a history of violence and loss and the ever-present possibility of spiritual transformation through art itself. He says that this fluidity is an “exciting language that I’m coming up with on my own. It’s just a pure language — a Joe language.”

Diggs’s journey into art began after a loss. “I had an older brother who was an artist,” says Diggs. “I always wanted to be better than him at anything he could do. He passed away when he was 19 and I was 16.” Diggs says he turned to painting to find strength in what his brother loved to do. It became a lifelong passion.