Home Artist Programs Supported Artists Dianna Settles

Dianna Settles

Lexington, Kentucky

Four people sit on a grassy lawn reading, writing, or sketching in this vertically oriented painting. A dog digs a hole near a fifth person who stands near a sign reading “Children Live Here” and a board covered with notices. A cobblestone road runs across the lawn in the center of the composition, and a person sits on the roof of a rusted-out car on the far side. Four people stand and a flock of 27 sheep graze on the lawn, which spans the top third of the composition.

Flourishing fully-flowered forgotten lawns sprawling and peopled teetering globe balancing us furnished worldly palms for holding to touch that which won’t be persona or jailed or sequestered or loved in that object way

2025

A pregnant woman wearing only white panties sits on a bed in front of a curtain striped with coral orange, white, olive green, and navy blue. The woman’s medium-toned skin is tattooed with scenes of childbirth and women, and she holds a bookmark and book in one hand as she reads. A black long-necked bird stands near a patch of yellow flowers on the wooden floor in the lower right corner.

Our work will be done when we can give these young ones a new world, a different world. I must be committed to the birth of that new world, which like every delivery will be painful and at the same time joyous

2025

Nine people with light- or medium-toned skin sit or stand in a loose grouping on a beach across the lower half of this horizontal painting. A dog bites a doll behind the group to the left, and a short distance away, two men wearing only black trunks stand with hands raised, as if ready to box, in front of a peach-toned sunset.

This season of heat and wind, this dinner tonight, and those large bands of trembling waves of various shades of green that split my heart with their incredible beauty. We’re witnessing the last days of civilization as we know it.

2024

Three pairs of people wrestle against a traffic cone-orange ground in this horizontal painting. Flowering vines climb up three wood posts that suggest a covered pavilion, and rain falls on the landscape beyond. A dark gray barn is painted with a quilt-like design on the horizon, which comes three-quarters of the way up this painting.

Good is the reckoning that uses no tallies and does no counting

2023

Artworks shown are selected from works submitted by the artist in their grant or residency application. All works are copyright of the artist or artist’s estate.

About Dianna Settles

Dianna is a Vietnamese-American artist with dark hair, who looks directly out at us. She wears a blue buttoned sweater cardigan and wide-legged white pants as she sits on a stool in front of a dark bronze-colored curtain.

Dianna Settles (b. 1989) is a Vietnamese-American artist from Blue Ridge, Georgia, currently living and working in Lexington, Kentucky. She received her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2014. Her 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), and Le Consortium (Dijon, France), 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).

Program Participation

Joan Mitchell Fellowship, 2026

Website / Social Links

“ I am a figurative painter whose compositions arrange portraits of both the living and passed into personal and communal records, creating semi-imagined presents and futures. Examining the political, cultural, and metaphysical aspects of collectivity, these compositions gesture towards a plethora of potential arrangements of a life worth living.”