Artist gains currency with her stamped cash

Peggy Diggs wanted to create art that forces people to question the importance of money. What better way, she reasoned, than to use currency as her canvas.

Two years ago, she began stamping cash with such thought-provoking questions as, “Do you feel the need to be paid for everything you do?” and “What is satisfied in you by buying things?”

Every bill that passes through Diggs’ wallet gets a stamp. With the help of 10 friends, relatives and fellow artists, she estimates she has circulated at least $100,000 in stamped money.

It’s fair to say millions of people have unwittingly laid hands on Diggs’ work, an audience few artists can match.

“It’s kind of like graffiti, but in a small, private way,” Diggs says. “I just love that there are people out there I’ve never met who are thinking about ways money has hurt them.”

The money-stamping project is just one of her many works of public art, a genre-bending form that defies artistic conventions. It’s not the kind of art that hangs in museums and galleries.

“Sometimes the work takes a form that doesn’t look like art at all,” she says.

She has plastered buses in Boston with children’s artwork. She has decorated milk cartons in New Jersey with a message about domestic violence. Her next project involves working with prisoners in Pennsylvania on developing products for people living in cramped spaces.

Erin Donnelly, curator of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, said public artists such as Diggs are stretching the traditional boundaries of art.

“Her work draws a solid connection between art and everyday life in a meaningful way,” said Donnelly, whose council awarded Diggs a five-month residency last summer.

Diggs, 58, teaches courses in feminism and public art at Williams College, while her husband, Ed Epping, teaches drawing. She relies on her salary, along with grants from private foundations, to finance her projects. She has only sold about five pieces of art, for a total of roughly $5,000, over the past three decades.

It doesn’t bother Diggs that most of her work, including the money-stamping project, is virtually anonymous.

“I specifically designed the stamps so my name isn’t on it,” she says. “That way, there’s no way people can get distracted from the message itself.”