Lesley Dill

PROVENANCE: Courtesy of the Artist

Puritan wife, mother of 14 children, Anne Hutchinson was outspoken enough to be banished by the elders of her community. Her spoken words, her voice, are among the earliest on record in America of a woman, transcribed from her trial. Hutchinson had a Vision and experienced Grace, which she began teaching about in her home- a repudiation of the established ministers’ teachings. For this effrontery “She had rather bine a Husbande than a Wife & a Preacher then a hearer”. She was banished and famously branded as “This American Jezebel”.

Variee edition — Text:

“Anne Hutchinson, Mystic Participant, As to me an immediate revelation, Grace”

   -Anne Hutchinson

“American Jezebel, A Very Dangerous Woman

Seeing the Flewentness of her Tongue & Her Willingness to Open Herself & Divulge Opinions & to Sow her Seed in Us – fret like gangrene & spread like Leprosy – She had rather bine a Husbande than a wife & a Preacher than a Hearer”

   -John Winthrop

Lesley Dill is an American artist working at the intersection of language and fine art in printmaking, sculpture, 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 April of 2018 the New Camerata Opera Company performed a re-staged version in New York City which was captured in a full-length film by Ed Robbins. Dill was the recipient of the Emily Dickinson Museum’s 2019 Tell it Slant Award.

In November 2019, Arthur Roger Gallery in New Orleans presented a collection of her work titled Drawings: Some Early Visionary Americans. In 2021, the Figge Art Museum in Davenport, Iowa will stage Dill’s exhibit Wilderness: Light Sizzles Around Me, which amplifies voices of the North American past as they wrestle with divinity, deviltry, and freedom.