Dianna Settles’ (b. 1989) practice examines what it is to exist as part of a collective, portraying how culture, politics, and ideologies intertwine in community. Forms are arranged symbolically in poetic compositions, placing portraits of friends into potent moments in time. Bathhouses, prisons, and gathering places are depicted in conversation, while blooming patterns, details, and colors are woven into the scenes. Settles draws from Western tradition, as well as from the art history of her father’s native Vietnam, mindfully synthesizing multiple lineages while recontextualizing marginalized bodies.
Dianna Settles was born in 1989 in Los Alamitos, California, and grew up in Blue Ridge, Georgia. She received her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2014. Previous solo exhibitions include Enemy of the Century at MARCH (New York, NY) in 2025, A Thousand Paths Bloom at Galerie Marguo (Paris, France) in 2023, A Life Worth Living Would Be A Life Worth Living at MARCH (New York, NY) in 2022, and Olly Olly Oxen Free at Institute 193 (Lexington, KY) in 2021. Settles has exhibited at the Knoxville Museum of Art (Knoxville, TN), The Carnegie (Covington, KY), The High Museum (Atlanta, GA), Le Consortium (Dijon, France), Casa Marguo (Menorca, Spain) and the San Francisco Art Institute (San Francisco, CA), among others. Her work is in the permanent collection of the ICA Miami (Miami, FL), X Museum (Beijing, China), Le Consortium (Dijon, France), and the Longlati Foundation (Hong Kong, China).
As the inaugural artist of Living Walls’ international exchange program, Settles completed an 180 foot-long mural titled: To Our Friends / Á Nos Amis in Paris, France in July of 2019. She has also completed murals in Atlanta, Oakland, and Pittsburgh. Settles was a finalist for the 2019 Forward Arts Foundation Edge Award, and a recipient of the Atlanta Contemporary Studio Artist Program. From 2016 to 2024, Settles co-led Hi-Lo Press and Gallery, a collective exhibition space and publisher in Atlanta, Georgia. She is a 2026 Joan Mitchell Fellow and South Arts Fellow. Settles currently lives and works in Lexington, Kentucky.
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Dianna Settles
I dreamt so long of all the trees I'd take you to in your first summer, 2026
Acrylic and colored pencil on panel
32 x 24 x 1 inches
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Put your ear to the limestone and you can hear blind rivers flowing underground,2025
Acrylic and colored pencil on panel
32 x 24 x 1 inches
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Dianna Settles
Composition is nothing more than the fruits of an unexpected meeting between separate worlds and the promise contained in the becoming commune of that meeting (tree planters in the snow), 2022
Acrylic and colored pencil on panel
32 x 48 inches
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Dianna Settles
How do we follow after you? Cupping circles, culling rows, 2022
Acrylic and colored pencil on panel
32 x 24 inches
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Dianna Settles
Making new alterations to the old calendar, bringing back the holidays that demand rest from our laboring, holidays for pleasure, holidays for praising the wind and the bees, for partaking in all of the ways that we are earthbound (we love our bread, we love our butter, but most of all we love each other), 2022
Acrylic and colored pencil on panel
32 x 48 inches
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Dianna Settles
Gentle, insistent, we remember the way, our babes toddle barefoot thru the cities of the universe (first make soda from the flowers, then medicine from the berries, then cut the trees to the ground until next Spring), 2022
Acrylic and colored pencil on panel
32 x 24 inches
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Dianna Settles
Colorfast/fugitives (a vital knowing of the potential to shape, to change, to build, to play, to open the world to new worlds, new possibilities, newly knotting ourselves to our place and time), 2022
Acrylic and colored pencil on panel
32 x 48 inches
Collection of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami
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Dianna Settles
All we ever wanted was everything (looting — immediate communization — shares no common ground with the world of the commodity. And yet, it expresses something abyssal within that world: the possibility that everything could be free.), 2022
Acrylic and colored pencil on panel
24 x 32 inches
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Dianna Settles: A Life Worth Living Would Be A Life Worth Living
Installation View
Photo by Cary Whittier