Each day in artist Lesley Dill’s studio begins and ends with poetry. She convenes with her team of interns in the studio in her Brooklyn Heights apartment three days a week. As the day begins, she chooses a poem at random from her Johnson edition of 1,775 Emily Dickinson poems and passes the book around, with everyone reading a line. Throughout the day, the team works together on Dill’s current work in progress, working title “This Private Hallucinatory Moment,” each choosing a phrase from Dickinson’s poetry to stencil and then sew onto organza-backed copper cutouts of what Dill refers to as “electric ladies.” They close the day with a reading of either an original poem by intern Sparrow Murray or a translation of Dickinson into one of the interns’ other languages: Finnish, Mandarin, Spanish, and perhaps more languages to come. 

“This Private Hallucinatory Moment” is a result of Dill’s 2023-2024 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship on outsider artists and late-1800s science (think electricity, magnetism, X-rays). “I think the overlap between art and science is discovery and adventure,” Dill said. “I was driven to make something of hidden glory, incorporating chemicals and feelings of discovery.” (Chemistry has been part of the artistic process: Dill and one of her interns used substances like salt and liver of sulfur to create unique patinas and iridescence on sheets of copper out on her fire escape.) Dill wanted to give the figures a feeling of “rising up,” which they do in more ways than one. They are fiery, fervent figures inspired by Indigenous healers, outsider artists, and both real and trickster scientists. And at an expansive 13 by 26 feet, the piece is designed to fill an exhibition wall at Arthur Roger Gallery in New Orleans, where it will land in December 2025. Until then, Dill and her team will keep immersing themselves and the electric ladies on the wall in poetry.

— Molly MacGilbert