Lesley Dill

Lesley Dill (born 1950) is an American contemporary artist.

Her work, using a wide variety of media including sculpture, print, performance art, music, and others, explores the power of language and the mystical nature of the psyche.

Dill currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Dill was born in 1950 to high school teachers, and was raised in Maine.

Dill received a Bachelor of Arts in English in 1972 from Trinity College and went on to receive a Master of Arts in Teaching from Smith College in 1974.

After a period of teaching in public and private schools, Dill went on to receive a Master of Fine Arts from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 1980.

It wasn't until her late twenties that Dill began to consider a career as an artist.

Growing up, she was an avid reader, and her fascination with language can be found in her art.

Before pursuing a career in art, Dill's exposure to art was mostly limited to the crafts practiced by various family members, including ceramics, linocut printing, rug making, and weaving.

As a result, some craft practices can be found in her art.

In 1985, Dill married filmmaker Ed Robbins, and their life together has played a role in shaping her work, especially in the places they traveled together.

In the eighties, Dill began working in sculpture, creating both wood and cast bronze sculptures.

A gift of Emily Dickinson poems in 1990 proved to be important to the development of Dill's style, as she began to work the text of poems directly into her pieces, something that she has continued throughout her career with the works of a variety of poets, including Emily Dickinson, Pablo Neruda, and Salvador Espiru.

Another major influence on Dill's work is the time she spent living and working in India with her husband.

There she was impacted by the landscape, weather, architecture, clothing, and other sensory aspects of her environment.

Her decision to experiment with painting text on human models and photographing these "living sculptures" was inspired by watching Indian women creating henna designs.

In the 1990s, Dill began a project with Graphicstudio/USF in Tampa, Florida, through which she created several large-scale pieces which were hung as billboards around the city.

The billboards reached a broader audience, including many who may not visit traditional museum or gallery settings.

In addition to her sculpture and works on paper, Dill is known for her performance work and public projects.

Her forays into photography transitioned into working in performance art, with pieces like Speaking Dress (1994).

She explores the relationship of text and language to a variety of media, often employing a diverse range of materials.

Voices in My Head from 1997, in the collection of the Honolulu Museum of Art, demonstrates how the artist combines photography with text, embellishing the work with charcoal and thread.

Dill has described language as being "...the touchstone, the pivot point of all my work."

Her work crosses traditional boundaries between artistic disciplines and includes printmaking, drawing, sculpture, photography and performance art, often used in tandem with one another.

In 2000, the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem presented Lesley Dill, Tongues on Fire: Visions and Ecstasy, the artist's first community-based project, which included a performance done in collaboration with the Emmanuel Baptist Church Spiritual Choir.

In 2002–2003, Dill's first museum retrospective, Lesley Dill: A Ten Year Survey, organized by the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY New Paltz, traveled to the CU Art Galleries, University of Colorado, Boulder; Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago; Contemporary Museum, Honolulu; Scottsdale Center for Contemporary Art; and the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC.

In 2003, Dill's performance project I Heard a Voice, done in collaboration with Tom Morgan and the Ars Nova Singers, was presented at the Evergreen Cultural Centre (Vancouver).

It included the world premiere of the performance piece I Dismantle.

The natural landscape in Maine served as an inspiration for her work and its impact can be found in several pieces, including the installation piece SHIMMER (2005-2006).

In 2007, Tremendous World, an exhibition at the Neuberger Museum in Purchase, NY, featured three new large-scale works, two measuring 20 x 65 feet, some of Dill's largest works to date.

In 2008, Dill conceived and directed a full-scale opera, Divide Light, based on the language of Emily Dickinson.

It premiered in August 2008 at the Montalvo Arts Center, Saratoga, California.

The opera was commissioned by Montalvo Arts Center and was supported in part by grants from the Rockefeller Foundation Multi Arts Production Fund, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

A film of the opera, Divide Light, premiered in New York City at the Anthology Film Archives in April 2009.

The music was done in collaboration with composer Richard Marriott.

In 2012, Dill began collaborating with Pamela Ordoñez on Drunk with the Starry Void, a multimedia musical performance.

It premiered in the summer of 2015 at the McNay Museum in San Antonio.

In April 2018, Divide Light was re-performed at Dixon Place in New York City by the New Camerata Opera.

Dill's work has been widely exhibited and the subject of numerous solo shows across the United States at both commercial galleries as well as museums such as the Neuberger Museum of Art (Purchase, NY), Mississippi Museum of Art (Jackson, MS), Queens Museum of Art and the Dorsky Museum (SUNY New Paltz, New Paltz, NY).

Her work can be found in the collections of the Albright Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; Brooklyn Museum; Cleveland Museum of Art; High Museum (Atlanta, GA); Kemper Museum, Kansas City; Metropolitan Museum of Art; MoMA; Whitney Museum of American Art; and Yale University Art Gallery, among many others.