Dashwood Projects presents In Cars: On Diana, an exhibition of paintings on paper by artist and writer Leanne Shapton. The work is based on photographs of Princess Diana getting out of cars. In Shapton’s hands, Diana is abstracted and turned into shades of grey reducing her to form and motion, exploring themes of celebrity, identity and facsimile.
Dashwood Books published In Cars: On Diana in Nov. 2025. Named one of the best art books of 2025 by the Brooklyn Rail, Karen Gu writes “Shapton’s images have a blurred and expressive, almost pixelated quality that prioritizes Diana’s gestures and physicality instead of lingering on the fine details… Even abstracted, the paintings, especially seen one after another, feel undeniably and essentially Diana.”
In her extended poem in the Dashwood publication, Shapton writes
“my favorite pictures
are the ones of her getting out of cars.
The reproduction of a royal is the point.
Lineage, bloodlines, primogeniture,
their bodies, their images on objects,
are objects.”
Shapton is the author of many books that push the boundaries of the form, most notably Swimming Studies (Blue Rider, 2012) and Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion and Jewelry (Sarah Crichton/FSG, 2009). Since 2021 she has been the Art Editor at The New York Review of Books, previously the Art Director of The New York Times Op Ed page. She is co-founder of J&L Books, a not-for-profit publisher of photography, art and writing. She has been an adjunct professor at Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University. She held solo art exhibitions at Thomas Fischer Gallery in Berlin, 2024, and Picture Gallery in Brooklyn, 2023.
Jason Fulford is an artist and co-founder of J&L Books (with Leanne Shapton). He is a Guggenheim Fellow, a frequent lecturer at universities, and has led workshops across the globe. Fulford’s photographs have been described as open metaphors. As an editor and an author, a focus of his work has been on the subject of how meaning is generated through association. A selection of his monographs include Sunbird (2000), The Mushroom Collector(2010), Contains: 3 Books (2016), most recently Lots of Lots (2025).
