• Patrick Diamond is a former member of the Mint Museum Board of Trustees and he and his wife have donated many pieces of artwork to the Mint Museum's permanent collection.
• The Incredible Joy of Collecting African American Art: My Journey from Frogtown, S.C. to the National Gallery, chronicles Diamond’s unique journey from growing up in poverty in South Carolina to avidly collecting African American art from across the world.  Diamond describes his childhood, where Jim Crow restrictions and segregated neighborhoods limited opportunities and reinforced social, political, and cultural inequities.  He also shares personal stories of how his love of art began with his Grandma, and how he and his wife Judy joined forces to support and celebrate African American artists. 

Accompanying Exhibition: Immersed in Light: Studio Drift at the Mint

Dates of Mint Exhibition: 9/20/2019 - 7/26/2020

About Dandelight: Dandelight is composed of real dandelion seeds. Every single seed is glued one by one onto an LED light by hand, with special tweezers: a very precise and time consuming art. Studio Drift picks the dandelions every year in May, in fields around Amsterdam. The seeds are carefully dried and stored in the studio. This labour intensive process symbolizes the fragility of life. It can be understood as a clear statement against mass production and the prevailing disposable culture of today's life.

About Studio Drift: Studio Drift is an Amsterdam (NL) based studio that uses advanced technology combined with fine craftsmanship. With each new work they attempt to make a kind of future prediction. Studio Drift develops site-specific installations and interactive sculptural experiences in spaces. We play with existing and new relationships between nature, technology and mankind. At first glance, the works seem to refer to familiar situations, but on further investigation these references are brought into question. This places the viewer in an interesting position, reshaping how we relate to our environment and stimulating new ways of thinking.

Includes Battery

Light the Barricades is an interactive public art installation that reimagines the wall as a site for contemplating our inner obstructions. Shining a light on the difficult emotions which thwart our progress, this project is inspired by the ancient I Ching, a philosophical system of diagrams first carved into the wall of a prison cell 3,000 years ago.

By reconfiguring the experience of contemplative Chinese landscape scrolls, luminaries, and private devotional images, Light the Barricades provides a modern ritual for distracting times and offers an engaging opportunity to contemplate walls both physically and emotionally as part of the W|ALLS: Defend, Divide, and the Divine at Annenberg Space for Photography, currently on display at The Mint Museum of Art.

This limited-edition signed book is the culmination of Light the Barricades. It collects hundreds of these responses, ranging from personal reflections to broader political, spiritual, and psychosocial statements that create a contemporary American portrait. It also includes the fables that appeared on the installations, an introduction to the I Ching, meditations on emotional barriers, and the artists’ notes on the process and the role of ritual in public life. Each book is signed by the artists and comes with a one-of-a-kind Chinese ink study by Candy Chang that developed into the artwork for the installation.

386 pages. 342 illustrations. 8.75 x 5.75 x 1.5 inches. Pearl linen cloth hardcover. 100 lb satin interior. Numbered edition of 250. Signed by the artists. Ink study: 7.5 x 5.5 inches, ink on watercolor paper, signed by the artist.