Lesley Dill: Wild Grace This Private Hallucinatory Moment

 

Lesley Dill: Wild Grace – This Private Hallucinatory Moment

 

Exhibition Dates:          December 6, 2025–February 13, 2026

Opening Reception:   Saturday, December 6, from 6–8 pm

Gallery Location:         432 Julia Street, New Orleans, LA 70130

Hours:                               Tuesday–Saturday, 10 am–5 pm

Contact Info:                  504.522.1999; www.arthurrogergallery.com 

 

The Arthur Roger Gallery is pleased to present Lesley Dill: Wild Grace – This Private Hallucinatory Moment, an exhibition of hand-cut copper and text works by Lesley Dill. The exhibition will be on view at the Arthur Roger Gallery, located at 432 Julia Street, from December 6, 2025, through February 13, 2026. An opening reception with the artist will be held on Saturday, December 6, from 6 to 8 PM, preceded by an artist walkthrough at 1 PM.

 

Each day in Lesley Dill’s Brooklyn Heights studio begins and ends with poetry. Surrounded by a small team of interns, she opens a well-worn edition of Emily Dickinson’s collected works, reading a random poem aloud, line by line, to begin the day’s work. Throughout the day, her team collaborates on her ongoing project, This Private Hallucinatory Moment, selecting fragments of Dickinson’s poetry to stencil and sew onto organza-backed copper cutouts, which Dill calls her Electric Ladies. The day closes as it began: with poetry, often an original verse by an intern or a translation of Dickinson into another language, such as Finnish, Mandarin, Spanish, and others.

 

This daily ritual of language and making fuels Dill’s newest body of work, created during and after her 2023–2024 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship on outsider artists and late-19th-century scientific discovery. Inspired by early experiments with electricity, magnetism, and X-rays, Dill explores what she calls “the overlap between art and science—discovery and adventure.” Her experimental process extends even to chemistry: she and her studio assistants have used salt, liver of sulfur, and other materials to create shifting patinas and iridescence on copper sheets, often working from her apartment fire escape.

 

At the heart of the exhibition is an expansive new wall piece, measuring 13 feet by 26 feet, designed specifically for the Arthur Roger Gallery. The work presents a host of fiery, fervent figures inspired by Indigenous healers, outsider artists, and both real and imagined scientists. As Dill describes them, these “electric ladies” seem to rise, charged with language and light, out of a vintage typewriter central to the installation. Flanking the main wall are individually presented figures. 

 

“Wild Grace – This Private Hallucinatory Moment is a work of hidden glory,” Dill says. “It’s about rising up—through poetry, through art, through discovery.”

 

ABOUT THE ARTIST 

Lesley Dill is an American artist whose work exists at the intersection of language and visual art through sculpture, printmaking, installation, and performance. Drawing from the writings of Emily Dickinson, Franz Kafka, Rainer Maria Rilke, and others, Dill transforms the power of words into material form, rendering poetry as an embodied, tactile experience. Her sculptures and wall works combine materials such as paper, wire, horsehair, and bronze with fragments of text that explore the tension between revelation and concealment.

 

Dill has presented more than one hundred solo exhibitions, and her work is held in major public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. She is a recipient of fellowships and awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, and the Emily Dickinson Museum, among others. Her multimedia opera Divide Light, based on Dickinson’s poetry, premiered in 2008 and was restaged in 2018 by New Camerata Opera in New York. Dill’s recent traveling exhibition, Wilderness: Light Sizzles Around Me (2021–2024), explored historic American figures wrestling with faith, freedom, and divine inspiration. The artist currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

 

For more information, please contact the Arthur Roger Gallery at 504.522.1999 or visit our website at www.arthurrogergallery.com.