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Proving that wonderful and provocative art can be found everywhere across America if you know where to look, “Wilderness, Light Sizzles Around Me” at the Figge Art Museum in Davenport, Iowa features a uniquely inspired group of sculptures and two-dimensional works more than a decade in the making. The installation will include many works made expressly for the Figge’s presentation including by Lesley Dill.
The exhibition represents Lesley Dill’s ongoing investigation into the significant voices and personas of America’s past. For Lesley Dill, the “American” voice grew from early America’s obsessions with divinity and deviltry, on fears of the wilderness “out there” and 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 explore this period in America’s history when limited access to a diversity of written word ignited the bravery of these figures in response to their times.”
The installation will be accompanied by a film of Dill’s 2018 opera Divide Light with libretto based on the writings of Emily Dickinson and designs by Dill. Lesley Dill’s works can be found in private and museum collections around the world.
This exhibition will be travelling widely beginning at the Figge Art Museum through August 22 then to:
Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts | Montgomery, Alabama, October 9, 2021 – January 2, 2022
Bates College Museum | Lewiston, Maine, January 21 – March 19, 2022
Canterbury Shaker Village | Canterbury, New Hampshire, May 28 – September 11, 2022
Munson Williams Proctor Arts Institute | Utica, New York, October 22, 2022 – January 29, 2023
Bernard A. Zuckerman Museum of Art | Kennesaw State University | Kennesaw, Georgia, February 25 – May 6, 2023
Female artist
What do you think?