Lesley Dill facts for kids

An art installation called Hell Hell Hell / Heaven Heaven Heaven by Lesley Dill. It was shown at a gallery in New Orleans, Louisiana, in 2010.

Voices in My Head (1997). This artwork is a photograph that Dill decorated with charcoal and thread. It is now in the Honolulu Museum of Art.

Lesley Dill (born 1950) is an American artist who creates modern art. She is famous for mixing words and language into her work. Dill uses many different types of media, including sculpture, prints, and even live performances, to explore big ideas about people's inner thoughts and feelings. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Early Life and Learning

Lesley Dill was born in 1950. Her parents were high school teachers, and she grew up in Maine. The beautiful nature of Maine inspired her, and you can see its influence in artworks like her installation SHIMMER.

Dill loved reading books as a child. She first studied English in college, not art. After teaching for a few years, she decided to become an artist in her late twenties. She earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 1980.

Her family members practiced crafts like weaving and making pottery. This early exposure to making things by hand also influenced her artistic style. In 1985, she married filmmaker Ed Robbins. Traveling with him, especially to places like India, gave her new ideas for her art.

Artistic Style and Career

Lesley Dill's art is known for combining words with images and objects. She often uses many different materials and art forms together.

The Power of Words

A major turning point for Dill came in 1990 when she received a book of poems by Emily Dickinson. She began to include the text of poems directly into her sculptures and other artworks. This became a key part of her style. She has used words from famous poets like Emily Dickinson and Pablo Neruda in her art.

Dill once said that language is "...the touchstone, the pivot point of all my work." This means words are the central, most important part of her art.

Mixing Different Art Forms

Dill is not an artist who sticks to just one thing. She makes sculptures from wood and metal. She also creates photographs, drawings, and prints. For example, her piece Voices in My Head is a photograph that she drew on with charcoal and sewed thread into.

While traveling in India, she was inspired by women who painted designs on their skin with henna. This gave her the idea to paint words on people and photograph them as "living sculptures." This led her to create performance art, where the artwork is a live event.

Major Projects and Performances

Dill enjoys sharing her art with the public in unique ways, often outside of traditional museums.

Community Art

In the 1990s, Dill worked on a project where her art was printed on huge billboards and placed around the city of Tampa, Florida. This allowed people who might not go to an art gallery to see her work in their daily lives.

In 2000, she created her first community project called Lesley Dill, Tongues on Fire: Visions and Ecstasy. It included a performance with a local church choir, bringing the community together through art.

Music and Opera

Dill's love for language and art also led her to music. In 2008, she created a full opera called Divide Light. The opera was based on the poems of Emily Dickinson. Dill directed the performance, and the music was written by composer Richard Marriott.

Later, in 2018, the opera was performed again in New York City by a group called the New Camerata Opera.

Exhibitions and Recognition

Lesley Dill's art has been shown in galleries and museums all over the United States and is part of many important collections.

Her work is in famous museums like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the MoMA in New York City, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the High Museum in Atlanta.

She has had many solo shows, which are exhibitions focused only on her art. One of her first major museum tours was Lesley Dill: A Ten Year Survey from 2002 to 2003. It traveled to museums across the country, from Hawaii to Washington, D.C.

Another big exhibition, I Heard A Voice: The Art of Lesley Dill, toured from 2009 to 2010. More recently, her exhibition Wilderness: Light Sizzles Around Me has been traveling to different museums from 2021 to 2023.

Dill has received many awards for her unique contributions to art. She was named a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 2017, which is a very high honor for artists and scholars.

See also

In Spanish: Lesley Dill para niños