The Visual Voice:  An Artists Books and Broadside Exhibition

new visions installation

Juried by Lesley Dill

 March 14 - April 8 

Reception Reservation

This exhibition presents an exquisite survey of contemporary artists' books and broadsides selected by artist Lesley Dill. Works on view celebrate varied collaborations between papermakers, bookbinders, printmakers, visual artists and in some cases poets and poetry. They additionally illustrate the rich and  vital developments in the field of book arts. Thus, this exhibition celebrates the power and artistry of both the book form as well as the visual and written word.

  • 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.
    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 staged her exhibit Wilderness: Light Sizzles Around Me, which amplifies voices of the North American past as they wrestle with divinity, deviltry, and freedom. The artist is represented by Nohra Haime Gallery in New York and Arthur Roger Gallery in New Orleans. 

    Lesley Dill lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

  • March 14  – May 14, 2023

    Mortin Gallery and Don Russell Clayton Gallery

    Wilderness, Light Sizzles Around Me features a uniquely inspired group of sculptures and two-dimensional works more than a decade in the making. The exhibition represents Dill’s ongoing investigation into the significant voices and personas of America’s past. For Dill, the “American” voice grew from early America’s obsessions with divinity and deviltry, on fears of the wilderness “out there” and the wilderness inside us. The extremes of both shaped history and gave pulse and heat to the words of activists like John Brown, Sojourner Truth, Mother Ann Lee, and Dred Scott. Dill writes, “These personas and their times stir something deep in my own family history and sense of self. I am compelled to this restrictive time-period of limited access to a diversity of written word, and the bravery of these figures’ response.” The book Lesley Dill: Wilderness, Light Sizzles Around Me by Scheidegger & Spiess, Zurich is available in conjunction with the exhibition and features essays by Nancy Princenthal, Andrew Wallace and others. This exhibition is organized by the Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa.