In Conversation | An Artist Talk by Lesley Dill
$10.00
Join us for an evening with New York-based artist Lesley Dill, whose work is featured in the current exhibition, The Art of Paper. Dill will talk about her projects that involve paper and collaboration, from huge community and large-scale installations to the intimate creation of artist books and sculptures, as well as her work with artists, poets, students, and studios, such as Tamarind and Dieu Donne.
PAPER IS MY FRIEND:
“Paper is about fingertip energy for me. The way one moves in to touch paper is like no other approach. It's as if each finger has a little imaginary rocketship in it. We touch nothing else the way we touch paper. Paper is the medium of intimacy. The end result is wonder. All printmaking begins with the choice of what paper and in this way it is about a relationship to fragility and force. This relationship comes from Poetry.”
Bio
Lesley Dill is an American artist working at the intersection of language and fine art in sculpture, printmaking, installation and performance, exploring the power of words to cloak and reveal the psyche. Dill has had over one hundred solo exhibitions. Her artworks are in the collections of many major museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. In 2017 she was named a fellow of The John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. Her opera, Divide Light, based on the poems of Emily Dickinson, was performed in San Jose in 2008, restaged in New York City in 2018, and captured in an award-winning film by Ed Robbins. Dill’s exhibition Wild Grace This Private Hallucinatory Moment at Arthur Roger Gallery in New Orleans (2025-26), a result of research conducted as a 2023-2024 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow, examined themes of radiance and healing in seen and unseen energies. Dill’s exhibition Wilderness: Light Sizzles Around Me, organized by the Figge Art Museum and traveled to seven venues from 2021 to 2023, amplifies voices of the North American past as they wrestle with divinity, deviltry, and freedom, including Mother Ann Lee, Black Hawk, Sojourner Truth, John Brown, Emily Dickinson, Horace Pippin, and Sister Gertrude Morgan. Ms. Dill is represented by Arthur Roger Gallery in New Orleans. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. For more information and images of her work, visit www.lesleydill.net
