Michael Diaz-Griffith ’09
From the parlor to the workshop
By Kiera O’Brien ’18
“I was so hungry for beauty,” recalls Michael Diaz-Griffith '09 of his choice to attend College of the Atlantic at the age of 18. “I came from a background that was very, very distant from the world of COA and the model of the liberal arts college,” explains Diaz-Griffith, who grew up in Florence, Alabama and hadn’t crossed the Mason-Dixon line until embarking for his first semester. “I found COA thanks to Martha Stewart Living. My dad, who didn’t go to college himself but knew I was looking for a liberal arts college in New England, called me in from the living room one day and said, Look, Martha is at a very pretty place in Maine!”
Certainly Diaz-Griffith was drawn to the idyllic beauty of the small sea-side campus. “Yes, it was about the architecture, The Turrets, the Beatrix Farrand gardens—I basically demanded to live in Seafox!” he jokes. But, he also recognized a holistic kind of beauty that was woven throughout the curriculum as much as it was reflected in the grounds. “I was looking for a college experience that matched and advanced and helped me evolve my values. I found COA and I just knew: This is it.”
He delighted in the permission COA gave him to intermingle his interests, unexpected as certain combinations seemed. “I loved that I could be studying Marx or Guattari in a Bruce Price gilded-age cottage a stone’s throw away from the sea and the Beatrix Farrand gardens. Those moments planted an important seed for me: I could immerse myself in radical, theoretical texts while simultaneously enjoying this important historical beauty and being a witness to its preservation. Rather than creating false binaries around things that can, in fact, be integrated, I learned that I could find a way for it all to be a part of one life.”
Today, Diaz-Griffith continues to put this philosophy into elegant practice as a curator, collector, art historian, and, most recently, author. Published by Phaidon in 2023, his book The New Antiquarians: At Home With Young Collectors celebrates a new generation of collectors—Diaz-Griffith’s peers—passionately giving new life to historic art and antiques through their distinctive personal collections. As he writes in the introduction to his book, “Collecting is a tradition, but an eccentric one, and it is carried out most capably by free-thinkers who prize self-expression, the pursuit of an individual sensibility, and the discovery—often through old things—of the new.”
Collecting is a kind of human ecology, a resonance Diaz-Griffith is quick to point out. “What I try to emphasize whenever I talk about antiques and material culture is that it’s about shifting our attention from the parlor to the workshop,” he says. “Shifting our gaze from the fancy associations that many of us bring to antiques and focusing instead on the context of craftsmanship and the making of an object is, for me, a very human-ecological act. The objects in our lives are living texts! Hopefully this shift encourages people who might not want to steward our material culture to do so.”
For almost a decade, Diaz-Griffith has advocated for newcomers across the fields of art history, antiques, and design, working to make art and design institutions “a little more vibrant” and a great deal more inclusive. Accustomed, as he readily jokes, to being the youngest person in the room, he has held leadership positions at the Sir John Soane's Museum Foundation and the Winter Show, one of the world’s leading art, antiques, and design fairs. He stepped into his current role as executive director of the Design Leadership Network in 2022. “It’s kind of my dream job. I get to blend my capacity for organizational leadership with my passion for design and support for craft-based disciplines.” How did he find his way here? “Sometimes life is about pursuing exciting projects that each have a different character until maybe, one day, you’re lucky enough to combine it all.”
