Lesley Dill: Wilderness: Light Sizzles Around Me
January 28 through March 26, 2022
By DEBORAH FRIZZELL, May 2022
Lesley Dill, a renowned New York-based artist, brings to life historical and literary figures from America’s past with hand-painted and sewn textile sculptures and banners in a traveling solo exhibition, Lesley Dill, Wilderness: Light Sizzles Around Me. Dill weaves imagery, text and historical visionary figures into a cascade of elongated figures, striking historical fonts, fractured stories and symbols. Each of her sculptural persona emerged from the “wilderness” of their day; each figure raising a voice in response to troubled and chaotic times in which they lived. Art and language evoke the fervor and spirituality embodied in Dill’s figures, provoking new ways to encounter, interpret and imagine times past echoing into the present. In the exhibition catalogue, Nancy Princenthal writes, “All of Dill’s Wilderness subjects are shown to have had direct contact with some form of transcendent energy. But the urgencies of our time, as social, environmental, and medical crises overlap and compound each other, make the study of history especially urgent.”
Lesley Dill has roots in Maine, where I visited her at Bates College Museum of Art in Lewiston, one of the venues for her installation. Dill was born in 1950 in Bronxville, New York, raised in Falmouth, Maine, and the Adirondacks. She received her Master of Arts from Smith College in 1974, and her Master of Fine Arts from Maryland Institute College of Art in 1980. Dill has had over 100 solo exhibitions and her work is in museum collections worldwide. She is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant, National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, Anonymous Was A Woman and the Tell It Slant Award from the Emily Dickinson Foundation.
Dill’s exhibition may be seen at Munson Williams Proctor Arts Institute, Utica, New York October 22, 2022 – January 29, 2023.
Deborah Frizzell: Lesley, your work for decades has been inspired by and continually embraced poetry. Tell me how you shifted from making art about poetry, a kind of reverse ekphrasis, to making art about history.
Lesley Dill: I frequently ask this myself. What happened to me? Awareness, happened to me. After working for decades with Emily Dickinson’s poetry, a thought, really a question, rose up in me. It was: What time period during the 19th century did Emily Dickinson write in? I felt like such an ignoramus because I didn’t know that Emily Dickinson wrote most of her poems during the American Civil War. So, I began to research history and the writing of history, historiography.
DF: With this new awareness of wanting to learn more about American history, where did you begin and how did Wildernesses 15 personae and their stories arise?
LD: I found out from my cousin Annie that our family had come over from England to Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1636. So, my research began with my own family’s history.
DF: Who and what did find out about?
LD: Anne Hutchinson! She was a Puritan wife and mother of 15 children. She was charismatic and outspoken about her personal religious experience. Early in life, Anne had a vision and experienced what she called, Grace. From her experience of Grace, she began teaching in her home and attracted an audience for her time. But for the Puritan community her discussion of her personal experience of Grace and faith was an effrontery, heresy. She was taken to court and ejected from the Commonwealth. Her words and charisma were threatening to the status quo.
