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Lesley Dill
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| 1950 |
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Born, Bronxville,
New York. Raised in Maine. Daughter of a schizophrenic father. Grows
to appreciate father’s personal and symbolic language. Develops
a fascination with the fragmentary and metaphoric capacity of language.
I grew
up in a psychically bilingual family never knowing when a word would
suddenly contain another meaning.
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| 1964 |
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Has a vision
at age fourteen, intensely remembered even today. Later described
as a moment in which the world’s extremes are reconciled.
At that
moment, I was given to understand the world. I understood pestilence,
sorrow, and the hugeness of everything. I understood that there
was a pattern threaded through all things – and that was all
right.
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| 1971 |
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Reconnected,
at age 21, with her childhood vision after taking a college course
about "ecstasy." Begins to practice meditation by repeating
a word or mantra. |
| 1972 |
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Receives
B.A. in English from Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut. |
| 1974 |
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Receives
M.A. in Philosophy from Smith College, North Hampton, Massachusetts. |
| 1980 |
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Receives
M.F.A from Maryland Institute of Art, Baltimore. |
| 1981 |
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Has
first exhibition, entitled The Positive Show, a group exhibition
at ABC No Rio, New York. |
| 1985 |
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Travels
to Nepal. |
| 1990 |
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Given
a book of Emily Dickinson’s poetry by her mother for her fortieth
birthday. Response is immediate. Dickinson’s resonant, oft-recurring
vocabulary and abrupt, equivocal syntax seem to influence choices
of material and juxtaposition. The artist and poet shared the mildly
foreboding New England landscape, as Dickinson lived her entire life
in Massachusetts. |
| 1991-92 |
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Travels to
India. Stays for eighteen months. Inspired by the Hindu language
and
her incomprehension of it.
I wanted
to make a visual equivalent of this melodic unintelligibility I
was hearing every day.
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| 1993 |
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Begins
working at the Landfall Press, a Chicago-based printer and publisher
of contemporary lithographs, etchings, and woodcuts. |
| 1994 |
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Constructs
a booklet to serve as an invitation to A Word Made Flesh, exhibition
at Gracie Mansion Gallery, New York. The booklet, a stunning work
on its own, is reminiscent of Dickinson’s packets of poems, which
were found after her death in 1866. Both are objects inviting touch
and waiting to be handled. |
| 2001 |
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Exhibition
Tongues on Fire: Visions and Ecstasy at Southeastern Center
for Contemporary Art (SECCA), as part of Artist and the Community
series. The program involves artists chosen from the local community
and challenges them to explore new artistic territory. Dill and
volunteers craft a questionnaire distributed to hundreds of people
in Winston-Salem. Questions were asked in each such as, "Have
you ever experienced feelings of peacefulness, bliss, rapture, or
all-knowingness? Have you ever experienced something that you couldn’t
explain? How have any of these experiences affected, inspired, or
transferred your life?" Dill then reduced these responses to
phrases that accurately represented Winston-Salem’s visionary
diversity. These phrases, along with photographic images created
by Dill on site, became a series of billboards along US Highway
52 and lyrics for songs sung by the Emmanuel Baptist Church Spiritual
Choir.
UC Boulder,
Interviews with the Contemplative Mind. Collected language
found its way into 15,000 copies of five different art cards that
were distributed by the Boulder art community by direct and unusual
means, including surreptitiously dropping them into grocery bags
or leaving them on café tables. This way, the audience is
included, just by the simple act of receiving. As a musical component,
Boulder’s Arts Nova Singers adapt their richly polyphonic,
early music-inspired a cappella style to lyrics supplied by Dill.
There is a fifty-minute opening night presentation of this collaboration,
I Had a Vision.
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| 2002 |
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Lesley
Dill: A Ten Year Survey opens at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of
Art, State University of New York at New Paltz.
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Lesley
Dill lives and works in New York, New York. |
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