Lesley Dill

Recorded via Zoom on Thursday, October 21, 2021

The Neuberger Museum of Art welcomed Lesley Dill, creator of the visually dazzling and site-responsive work “Rush” (2006-07) that is currently on view in the museum’s Theater Gallery. This immersive installation is an enormous collage of hundreds of interconnected animal and human figures culled from world spiritual traditions and representing love, death, transcendence, and other themes. Dill will discuss “Rush” and her other work.

Moderated by Neuberger Museum of Art, Curator of Education, Youth & Adult Programs Diana Puglisi.

About the Artist

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 transforms the emotions of the writings of Emily Dickinson, Salvador Espriu, Tom Sleigh, Franz Kafka, and Rainer Maria Rilke, among others, into works of paper, wire, horsehair, foil, bronze and music—works that awaken the viewer to the physical intimacy and power of language itself.

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 Museum of Modern Art New York, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 2017 she was named a fellow of The John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and is a Joan Mitchell Foundation Creating A Living Legacy artist and grant recipient. Her opera, Divide Light, based on the poems of Emily Dickinson, was performed in San Jose in 2008. In 2018 the opera was re-staged in New York City and captured in an award-winning film by Ed Robbins. Dill was the recipient of the Emily Dickinson Museum’s 2019 ‘Tell it Slant’ Award.

Dill’s exhibit Wilderness: Light Sizzles Around Me recently opened at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts in Montgomery, Alabama, the 2nd of 6 venues, and will be on view there through January 2nd 2022. The exhibition amplifies voices of the North American past as they wrestle with divinity, deviltry, and freedom.

Ms. Dill is represented by Nohra Haime Gallery in New York and Arthur Roger Gallery in New Orleans.

She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Speakers

• Richard Mayhew
  Landscape painter, illustrator, and arts educator
  
  
• Ina Mayhew ’81 (design tech)
  Production designer for film and television
  
  
• Scott Mayhew
  Graphic designer and brand builder

Moderator

• Diana Puglisi
  

  Curator of Education, Youth & Adult Programs, Neuberger Museum of Art