10″x8″; hand-cut paper collage, ink, thread on Japanese
silk tissue paper; 2019
Courtesy of the artist.
COLLAGE ON VIEW
Lesley Dill: Some Early Visionary Americans
at Arthur Roger Gallery in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA
2 November-21 December 2019
This is Lesley Dill’s tenth exhibition with the gallery and was inspired by early American poets, speakers, religious visionaries, and abolitionists. In this collection of collages and drawings on Japanese silk tissue paper adorned with thread and cut paper, Dill imagines the lives of the visionary Americans that inspire her work. What came to their mind when they write, what was happening in the country, and who were their forebears in voice and context. These play out in the twenty-four pieces included in the exhibition.
Themes of contradiction and excess and ecstasy, activism and terrorism, stillness and chaos, repression and freedom, madness and sanity. These extremes have shaped history and fueled the creative process of both Lesley Dill and the early Americans to whom she pays homage.
Dill is deeply interested in language, faith and spirituality. Drawing inspiration from the words of poets, authors, and religious leaders such as Emily Dickinson, Nathaniel Hawthorne to John Brown, Sojourner Truth, Mother Ann Lee, and Sister Gertrude Morgan. Her desire is to cover a large inclusive range of austere and intense emotion.
18″x15″; hand-cut paper collage, ink, on Japanese silk
tissue paper; 2019
Courtesy of the artist.
Lesley Dill was born in Bronxville, New York in 1950 and grew up in Maine. After graduating from Trinity College in 1972 she completed an M.A. at Smith College in 1974 and received an M.F.A. in 1980 from the Maryland Institute College of Art. Her work can be found in many collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art and The Whitney Museum of American Art. Her exhibit “I Heard A Voice: The Art of Lesley Dill,” organized by the Hunter Museum of American Art, Chattanooga, TN is currently traveling to Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA; Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, FL; Palmer Museum of Art, Penn State University, University Park, PA; Arkansas Art Center, Little Rock, AR; and Columbia Museum of Art, Columbia, SC. The artist currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
(text adapted from the curator’s press materials)
INFORMATION
Arthur Roger Gallery
432 Julia Street
New Orleans, Louisiana 70130 USA
(504) 522-1999
Hours:
Tuesday-Saturday, 10AM-5PM