“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.” - Deborah Frizzell, Whitehot Magazine
Wilderness: Light Sizzles Around Me
Currently on view at The Ulrich Museum in Wichita, KS through December 2nd, 2023
Presented by Dave Clough Photography
and the Bates College Museum of Art
Organized by the Figge Art Museum
Wilderness: Light Sizzles Around Me Exhibition Tour:
Figge Art Museum | Davenport, Iowa May 29 – August 22, 2021
Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts | Montgomery, Alabama October 9, 2021 – January 2, 2022
Bates College Museum of Art | Lewiston, Maine January 28 – March 26, 2022
Canterbury Shaker Village | Canterbury, New Hampshire May 28 – September 11, 2022
Munson Williams Proctor Arts Institute | Utica, New York October 22, 2022 – January 29, 2023
Bernard A. Zuckerman Museum of Art | Kennesaw State University | Kennesaw, Georgia March 4 – May 6, 2023
Ulrich Museum of Art | Wichita State University | Wichita, Kansas August 24 – December 2, 2023
“All of these American people are shaped by the unknown luminosity and terrors of complicated, contradictory life; a wilderness of challenging missions into the unknown. What was the road map for these baffled women and men? How did they come to set themselves apart from the pull of this new country, finding its own rules and traditions? Almost all of them, their lives, their thinking, their actions have a relationship to Visionary Revelation. They each had a moment where the universe, as God or Nature, was revealed to them.” -Lesley Dill
Wilderness Catalog
This beautiful hardcover exhibition catalogue features:
* Over 75 full-color images of Dill's work
* Essays by Nancy Princenthal, Andrew Wallace, and Lesley Dill about the journey of creating Wilderness
* Poetry by Ray A. Young Bear and Tom
Sleigh
Published by the Figge Art Museum and Verlag Scheidegger & Spiess AG, Zurich