For over fifteen years, Jamie Diamond has explored the evolving nature of human connection through photography, performance, video, and film. Her practice centers on the human figure, deconstructing it through themes of motherhood, memory, and intimacy.
During her weeklong visit in May, 2025, Diamond met with staff and started exploring. She was invited to tour the Conservation Labs, where the team was working on a range of objects, including a 16th–17th century strongbox from the Tapestry Room about which little is known. She roamed the Museum’s galleries outside of public hours, studying the fabrics, paintings, furniture, and observed how light shifted through the spaces. She was particularly moved by the many depictions of the Madonna and Child painting and sculptures in Isabella’s Collection.
In August, after a trip to Italy, visiting the Palazzo Barbaro in Venice, Diamond returned to the Gardner for three weeks accompanied by her family. While her children attended camp, she delved deeper into learning about Isabella Stewart Gardner’s Collection, friendships, and her experience as a mother. She studied several photographs of Gardner, including the only two known images of Isabella with her son, Jackie, and learned about the nephews Isabella and Jack cared for after Jack’s brother’s death. She also read Francis Marian Crawford’s letters to Gardner.
Gardner and Crawford shared a love of the Italian poet Dante. Their deep friendship inspired rumors of an affair. Around 1882 the two had a photo taken of their clasped hands. The photograph, together with an interwoven and bound volume of their personal editions of Dante’s Divine Comedy, endures as a trace of their mutual admiration and carries romantic undertones. Crawford inscribed the photograph with, "Two hands are united in love—one spirit united and a single heart." A similar message appears on the silver clasp of the bound Dante which was designed by Crawford and produced by Tiffany & Co. Diamond took photographs of the archival materials with her camera and through a magnifying glass.
Diamond spent her evenings in the Artist Apartment reading Isabella Stewart Gardner’s correspondence with Henry James and Bernard Berenson, two of Gardner’s lifelong friends and drew inspiration from Henry James’s The Madonna of the Future, a story that probes the tension between idealized artistic representation and lived maternal experience. Using the natural light of the summer sun, Diamond photographed herself in character at various spots throughout the Museum as part of her ongoing series, I Promise to Be a Good Mother. In this work, Diamond assumes the dual role of subject and photographer, staging intimate scenes of mother-child interactions with one of the Reborn dolls she created. The series began in 2011 from a rule book Diamond made as a child for her future self which evolved into a study of the complexities and contradictions within the mother–child relationship. The final images reexamine the archetypal mother-and-child motif, long idealized in art historical iconography, offering a contemporary response to the enduring ideal of maternal perfection. The reborn doll serves as an uncanny surrogate for the infant, blurring the line between the imagined and the real, the performative and the intimate.
Various scenarios were acted out in the galleries, including sitting alongside Henry James’s portrait in the Blue Room on the Museum’s first floor and eating a meal in Gardner’s Fourth floor dining room. The scenes depict the everyday interactions she was having with her own children—doing laundry, playing games, reading, eating, and resting while also imagining how Isabella might have lived and moved through the space. This work addresses the evolving nature of human and synthetic relationships, exploring how surrogacy, both physical and emotional, is redefining contemporary experiences of intimacy. The images explore the construction of maternal identity through photography and performance, set within this historically preserved domestic and institutional interior.
Diamond noted, “I staged this work amongst the Madonna-and-child iconography that fills the Collection and the life of Isabella Stewart Gardner, who endured the personal tragedy of losing her son. My four week residency living at the museum deepened my interest in the discourse around persona, and how identity and tradition are preserved and reimagined. This site, part private home, part public institution, provides a rich framework for exploring these narratives and became the perfect stage set for this work.”
Diamond often collaborates with strangers, professional actors, and outsider artists to inhabit a range of characters and roles. While in residency she reached out to the Reborn Community in the area inviting them to meet and have their photograph taken with their reborn babies amongst the Madonna and Child iconography that permeates the collection. The Reborn Community is a diverse group of artists and collectors who share an interest in handmade, hyper-realistic baby dolls that are customized. The dolls are created for a variety of reasons including coping with grief, infertility, loneliness or as a tool in dementia care. A mother and Reborn artist responded to Diamond’s inquiry and they spent the day together getting to know each other and taking portraits in the Museum.
Before she left, Diamond visited the Conservation Department for a second time, traveled to Hingham to visit the Museum’s greenhouses in full bloom, and went on a late-night flashlight tour through the galleries. Diamond also took advantage of exploring the Boston area with her family and joined the Museum’s Staff Summer Party.
Four early works from Jamie Diamond’s I Promise to Be a Good Mother series will be featured in the exhibition, Persona: Photography and the Re-Imagined Self, February 19–May 10, 2026. She has also created a new work for the Museum’s Facade public art space, titled Monstra Te Esse Matrem, which will be on view at the same time as the show.
Artist Bio
Jamie Diamond’s (USA) work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions, some of which include, Osservatorio, Fondazione Prada, Italy; Prada Mode, Hong Kong; Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal; Museum für neue Kunst, Germany; Mass MoCA, North Adams, The Bronx Museum, New York; Trapholt Museum, Denmark; Kunsthalle Erfurt, Germany; Fondazione La Triennale, Milan; Deichtorhallen, Hamburg; and Museo d’Arte Contemporanea della Sicilia, Palermo.
In addition, Diamond served as cinematographer and producer on the short feature film, A Minor Variation (2018) & directed and produced Skin Hunger (2024) which was screened at the Watermill Center and the Anthology Film Archives in 2025.
Diamond is a recipient of the NYFA Fellowship Award in Photography, the Toby Devan Lewis Fellowship Award, and The Sachs Program for Arts Innovation. She’s held residencies at The Bronx Museum, MassMoCA, Mana Contemporary, The Watermill Center, The Church, and the LMCC Swing Space residency & Work Space. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, artnet, AnOther Magazine, Whitewall, Aperture, Hyperallergic, Vanity Fair, The Architects Newspaper, Vogue, and Artsy. Diamond received her MFA from the University of Pennsylvania in 2008 and BA from the University of Wisconsin in 2005.
Since 2009, she has been lecturing in photography at the University of Pennsylvania and is currently the head of the Undergraduate Photography Department. She lives and works in New York.