A Brooklyn Artist Adjusts to Making Art in Solitude
By Julie Lasky
April 2, 2020
Lesley Dill usually works with six to eight assistants, but now she is alone with the hundreds of yards of fabric she uses for her mixed-media art.
Lesley Dill works on a scroll for “Wilderness: Where You Come from Is Gone,” an exhibition scheduled to open next year at the Figge Art Museum in Davenport, Iowa. Photo by Ed Robbins.
Lesley Dill, a mixed-media artist who has had more than 100 solo exhibitions, works in a 300-square-foot studio in her apartment in an Art Deco tower in Downtown Brooklyn that she shares with her husband, Edward Robbins, a journalist and filmmaker.
The studio is many times smaller than the museums and galleries in which she typically exhibits her art. Sometimes her ambitions force her to spill into the kitchen. But since the coronavirus appeared and Ms. Dill, 70, had to send her half-dozen assistants home, her life has contracted.
She has been left alone with hundreds of yards of fabric scrolls on which she stencils lush quotations plucked from the 19th century. Surrounding her, too, are huge cloth figures dressed in spiky word-covered garments.
These are the components of “Wilderness: Where You Come From Is Gone,” Ms. Dill’s evolving study of divinity and deviltry in the early United States. The textile figures represent religious crusaders, social activists and Native American leaders whose voices have improbably risen from repression and exclusion. The cast includes the Puritan reformer Anne Hutchinson, the abolitionists James Brown and Sojourner Truth, the Shakers founder Mother Ann Lee, the artist Horace Pippin, the Sauk leader Black Hawk and a dozen others.
Exhibited in New York in 2018, “Wilderness” is scheduled to open in its expanded version next year, on May 29, 2021, at the Figge Art Museum in Davenport, Iowa. In late March, Ms Dill spoke by phone about adapting to her new work style. (This interview was edited for clarity and length.)