Deep in the halls of the Mark W. Stiles Unit, a men’s prison in Jefferson County, Texas, an icy-haired woman splashes color onto a page. Using the back of her left hand as a palette, the bristles of her brush plucked from atop her head, she works in a blur of scarlet, cerulean, and ocher. As the painting comes into focus, flames flicker beneath a sapphire sky. Before long, she will meet her own gaze, mirrored in ruddy hues and bountiful curves, face beat for the gods. Her expression is at once serene and beckoning. She’s waiting for something. Soon, she’ll have her answer.
One evening in the summer of 2012, Gabriel Joffe sat at a long table in the basement of a burrito spot in Boston, Massachusetts, submerged in hundreds of letters. It was a typical Sunday spent volunteering for Black and Pink, an abolitionist organization that connects LGBTQ+ people within the American prison system to those outside of it. Sifting through piles of mail, one missive caught the then-23-year-old’s attention. Beyond the usual greeting, this one came accompanied by an original watercolor on letter-size paper. “It was just stunning,” says Joffe of the image, a portrait of a figure with almond-shaped eyes and a swoosh of white hair. “I’d never seen anything like it.”
The letter ended with a message that matched the upbeat, prideful picture: “Queer people rock,” enthused its creator, a woman by the name of Jamie Diaz.
Joffe wrote back thanking Diaz for her art and welcoming a response to their personal address. A month later, Diaz’s reply arrived in the form of a sprawling painted tableau, complete with several trans angels and devils, one of whom held a scroll. In a swooping, floral hand, she explained that the pieces she’d shared already comprised only a sliver of what she could do. Before signing the note, Diaz presented Joffe with a mysterious offer: “Give me a little time, and if you like, I would be happy to share the kind of art I really do with you.”
Over the next 10 years, the pair went on to exchange some three hundred letters. True to her word, Diaz welcomed Joffe into the vibrant world of her more formal paintings, which take the affirmational tone of her cartoons and add surrealist, almost extraterrestrial backdrops, unexpected light sources, and a healthy dose of black humor.
Diaz also welcomed Joffe into her family; nowadays, they speak of each other as chosen aunt and nephew. One year for their aunt’s birthday, Joffe made a website to house digital versions of the over 50 paintings Diaz had gifted them. The online collection ended up attracting a wider audience than Joffe expected, including Dan Cooney, curator of a gallery in Chelsea, New York. Like Joffe ten years before, Cooney was floored by Diaz’s unique renderings of unabashed queer and trans joy. “The paintings felt very deep and very connected to me,” the gallerist shares.
Cooney’s connection ran so deep that he asked Joffe about co-curating a solo show of Jamie’s art. It’s been a year since that first message. Today, Diaz’s debut, entitled “Even Flowers Bleed,” opens at Daniel Cooney Fine Art.
“I found it absolutely profound that she’s sitting in a prison cell and making [these paintings] that transcend any kind of physical barrier, that reaches such a fundamental humanity,” says Cooney. “There is a whole system designed to make her feel as though she’s nothing. And here she is, making this work that says she’s everything.”
Jamie Diaz, 64, started drawing as a kid growing up in Houston. In an interview conducted by Joffe that accompanies the show, the painter shared an early memory of her mother realizing her child’s natural talent. “She loved my artwork,” Diaz remembers. “She even took some and showed it to her doctor. He said, ‘[She’s] another Picasso!’”
Although it was a flattering compliment, the aspiring artist was, in truth, more inspired by the canvases of the old Dutch masters. “A lot of them used those dark earth tones and real powerful light. I love all that stuff. That was my first influence,” she later told Joffe in the exhibition interview.
Diaz followed her passion, taking several art classes throughout her adolescence while reading every art book she could get her hands on. At first, she painted landscapes and more traditional portraits. She also dabbled in other mediums, including a brief stint as a tattoo artist. Making comics stuck more, and some of her playfully desirous creations will be on view as part of the exhibition. Painting, though, has always been Diaz’s primary outlet. But it wasn’t until she had reached her thirties that she arrived at what she considers her original style.
By that point, Diaz had experienced one run-in with the criminal justice system and was on the precipice of another. The latter, which involved felony drug charges, came with a life sentence. As a trans woman in a men’s jail, Diaz has overcome unimaginable hardship, ranging from the daily indignities of imposed masculinity to more severe forms of abuse. Yet in her life, as in her art, Diaz refuses to allow these traumas to define her. In her exchanges with Joffe, she is resolute. In her paintings, she is free.
Consider a work like the defiant Queer Spirit (Self-Portrait). In it, Diaz depicts herself walking down a wide open road under a clouded blue sky. She holds a rainbow flag, the banner of which transforms into the body of a bird flying overhead. It’s as if the demonstration of her pride is potent enough to produce wings of escape. As she writes in crimson toward the bottom of the image, “Our queer hearts will not be denied.”
The words echo a sentiment she shared with Joffe; that simply moving through life as her true self constitutes an act of liberation. “Living my life openly as a trans woman is the most liberating and wonderful joy I have ever known,” she explains.
The sense of liberation Diaz feels living openly in her womanhood is palpable in her paintings. Speaking with Them via Joffe, Diaz details the transportive power of making art. “I go all over the world in my mind when I’m working,” she says. “Sometimes I think I even go to other worlds.”
It was this feature of Diaz’s work, among others, that first drew the admiration of multimedia artist and filmmaker, Zackary Drucker. “I believe that we are able to construct ourselves in the images we create, and her imagination is wildly expansive beyond the confines of her incarceration,” she tells Them. “Each painting is like it’s own escape hatch, a way out.”
Diaz’s depiction of Cupid and his arrows is another example of the way she’s using her art as a means of building a world for herself, Drucker adds: “These paintings are [themselves] arrows to us. And because we are receiving them, [Jamie] can create an expansive network.”
The creation of this community on the outside is far from a happy coincidence. Diaz is up for parole in a couple of years. “A big thing about making a case for parole is showing that you have a support system,” Joffe notes. “I hope that this exhibition shows she has a lot of beauty to contribute on the outside…At the end of the day, that’s what this is all building towards — her release.”
Some five decades since she first picked up a brush, Jamie Diaz is now among the small class of contemporary artists to have a solo exhibition shown in a Chelsea gallery. For Cooney, the moment is humbling, a career highlight. What it isn’t, he tells me, is exceptional. This point is important to the curator and gallerist, who stresses “Even Flowers Bleed” isn’t a performative gesture, but rather an investment in the work of a painter he believes has a promising future in the art world. “This is not a charity event for me,” he says. “I have a program at my gallery that she fits into perfectly. It’s not like she’s totally out of left field. Even if she wasn’t incarcerated, I would still be interested.”
There’s no denying the current situation is bittersweet. Diaz won’t be able to see her paintings on the wall in person. But this reality is softened by the certainty those around the artist have that this won’t be her last exhibition — a certainty that’s strongest in Diaz herself. “She’s going to keep making art until she can’t hold a paintbrush anymore,” says Joffe.
A few days ago, the pair spoke by phone. The pieces had been installed on the walls of Cooney’s space, and aunt and nephew were taking in the moment. “For so many years it was just Jamie and I talking about her art, and so it’s just so moving and gorgeous to see the paintings in these beautiful frames, in full light, exactly as they’re meant to be seen,” they say.
As for Diaz, she’s eager to see photos of people taking in her work. Toward the end of the recent chat with Joffe, the subject turned to the future. If released, Diaz’s goal, they explain, is to become a working artist who’s so successful she can give back to her community.
The artist’s parting words: “We’re just getting started.”
Jamie Diaz: Even Flowers Bleed is showing at Daniel Cooney Fine Art through October 29.
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