Diamond Stingily: Orgasms Happened Here

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52 Walker is pleased to announce its twelfth exhibition, Orgasms Happened Here, which features new work by the New York–based artist Diamond Stingily (b. 1990). Stingily‘s multidisciplinary practice traverses varied fictive, biographical, and autobiographical narratives to recast the symbolic order that governs everyday objects. Throughout 52 Walker, she has installed a series of site-specific architectural interventions that evoke the colors, scale, and ambience of suburban American households and places of worship. These interstitial spaces, as well as the gallery itself, serve as portals into the whimsical and dark memories that are often suppressed in the name of adult decorum, revealing glimpses of the libidinal longing secretly stored in the artist‘s and our own collective imaginations.

The exhibition title is taken from the artist‘s childhood memories: when Stingily‘s family first moved into the home where she spent her adolescence, her brother discovered a sticky note affixed above the door of a closet in his bedroom that read “orgasms happened here.” In her presentation at 52 Walker, Stingily zeros in on the closet and other thresholds—locked doors, stained-glass windows, and ready-made gate sculptures— that symbolize privacy, transition, curiosity, and transgression.

Diamond Stingily: Orgasms Happened Here is curated by Ebony L. Haynes and presented by 52 Walker.

Diamond Stingily was born in Chicago in 1990. Stingily has exhibited widely since 2015, when her first solo presentation, Diamond Stingily: Forever in Our Hearts, was held at Egg, a project space in Chicago founded by artists Puppies Puppies and Forrest Nash. In 2018, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, hosted Diamond Stingily: Life in My Pocket, the first institutional solo exhibition of her work. Also in 2018, the artist was given the opportunity to perform at MoMA PS1 with an open recording of her radio show, The Diamond Stingily Show, which she began broadcasting on Know Wave in 2017. The following year Diamond Stingily: Doing the Best I Can was presented by the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts at California College of the Arts, San Francisco, and Diamond Stingily: Wall Sits took place at Kunstverein München, Munich.

Stingily is represented by Greene Naftali, New York; Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin; and Cabinet Gallery, London.