53 HIGHLIGHT GIFT FROM LESLEY DILL M.A.T. ’74 IN LATE 2017, BROOKLYN-BASED ARTIST Lesley Dill M.A.T. ‘74 donated 54 prints to SCMA, making the museum the repository of record for her extensive body of work in multiples. With this important gift, SCMA now owns impressions of all of Dill’s prints, and the artist has pledged to donate new works as they are published. The first print donated under this agreement was realized with the December 2017 gift of Dill’s latest print, Hester, by the Detroit-based publisher Signal Editions. Wing, published by the University of the Arts, Philadelphia, was added to the collection in early 2018. Dill’s evocative works center on the relationship between language, spirituality and the human body. She came to the practice of art in her late 20s, although earlier life experiences contributed significantly to the forms of her visual expression. Key among these was a mystical experience in her teens when she became conscious of the underlying connection among all things in a very visual and tangible way. According to Dill: “I felt this sense of hugeness, a sense that there was a pattern all over everything and it was all right. And this realization was accompanied by a feeling of bliss, which I had never experienced before.” Dill studied English at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, graduating with a B.A. in 1972, and received a master’s in teaching from Smith in 1974. An early experience teaching art at a high school in her native Maine solidified this connection among words, imagery and lived experience, so she pursued the study of art, graduating with an M.F.A. from the Maryland Institute of Art in 1980. Dill began making prints in the early 1990s, shortly after she received a book of Emily Dickinson’s poetry as a gift from her mother. Although Dill had not previously been drawn to poetry, Dickinson’s words struck a chord: the poet’s short evocative phrasing recalled Dill’s formative mystical experiences and became a rich resource for artistic inspiration. She also became entranced by the material properties of paper, which she explored further during almost two years living in India. As Dill understood very little Hindi, she experienced language as a tangible visible entity, and was also inspired by the aesthetics of life in India—the colors, fabrics and use of henna for body decoration. These influences would coalesce in the regular production of prints and multiples that combined a wide variety of media printed on different weights and textures of paper, incorporating three-dimensional elements and fragments of poetry. Dill has continued to stretch the boundaries of print media, and has also created sculptural editions, such as Poem Hands, that include metal, wire and thread. This gift joins nine works by Lesley Dill already in the SCMA collection, including prints, photographs and sculpture. Works on paper are available for viewing by appointment in the Cunningham Center for the Study of Prints, Drawings and Photographs. ABOVE: Lesley Dill. American, born 1950, Ear Poem, 1994. Lithograph on Japanese Sugi Tissue with cast bronze and black thread mounted on Okawara paper and opaque Plexiglas (AP 1/3). Gift of Lesley Dill