Diane Samuels

photo by: Grace Roselli, Pandora’s BoxX Project

Diane Samuels is a visual artist, with studio and public art practices. In both she uses other peoples’ words as her literal and figurative raw material. She has made drawings by writing out the texts of entire novels in micro-handwriting, converted a two-story glass pedestrian bridge into an anthology of phrases about looking at the world closely.

Since 2010, Samuels has made drawings that are hand-transcriptions of entire books. She chooses books based on the core mission of City of Asylum an organization she co-founded with her husband Henry Reese. City of Asylum provides sanctuary to writers in exile who are persecuted for their literary writing. The books Samuels chooses to transcribe deal with the themes of exile, social justice, and encountering “the other.”

Her exhibitions include the Arnold Arboretum at Harvard, Les Franciscaines (Deauville, France), San José Institute of Contemporary Art, Andy Warhol Museum, the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Mattress Factory Museum, National Library of Technology (Prague, Czech Republic), the Leo Baeck Institute, the Center for Book Arts, the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, the Contemporary Arts Center of Cincinnati, the Municipal Museum of Art (Gyor, Hungary), Jerusalem Biennale, the Synagogue Center (Trnava, Slovakia), the Bernheimer Realschule (Buttenhausen, Germany), and the Czech Museum of Fine Arts.

Her work is in public and private collections including the Carnegie Museum of Art, Bank of New York Mellon, Reed College, Municipal Museum of Art (Gyor, Hungary), the Ruth and Marvin Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry.

Her permanent site-specific artworks include Luminous Manuscript (Center for Jewish History New York) and Lines of Sight (Brown University). Luminous Manuscript was awarded an IFRAA/Faith & Form Award for Religious Art and Architecture in 2005 and is included in Judith Dupré’s 2007 (Random House) book, Monuments: America’s History in Art and Memory.

In 1998 she built The Alphabet Garden, a commissioned memorial garden in Grafeneck, Germany, site “A” of the so-called euthanasia experiments in 1940. In 2002, she completed a six-year project working with history and current issues in Buttenhausen, Germany, which culminated in performances, exhibitions, and a book documenting the project (Imprints and Artifacts/Prägungen und Werkstücke).

Samuels holds both a bachelor’s and master’s degree in fine arts from Carnegie Mellon University, a diploma from the Institute in Arts Administration at Harvard University and has received honorary doctorates from Seton Hill University and Chatham University. She is also co-founder (with her husband, Henry Reese) of City of Asylum cityofasylum.org, which provides sanctuary to writers in exile.

In 2013 Samuels was recipient of a Rockefeller Bellagio Residency in Italy and an American Academy in Jerusalem Fellowship. In 2016 she was a Visiting Artist in the Digital Art Studio at Carnegie Mellon University.

Samuels works with Pavel Zoubok Fine Arts in New York City.