Lesley Dill to present Malloy lecture March 9
Lesley Dill
Artist Lesley Dill will present the 2015 Malloy Visiting Artist lecture at Skidmore
College on Monday, March 9. Free and open to the public, the talk is scheduled to
begin at 6 p.m. in Gannett Auditorium, Palamountain Hall.
Dill is recognized for using a variety of media and techniques to explore themes of
language, the body, and transformational experience through sculpture, photography
and performance. Specifically, Dill’s work is about human beings and their relationship
to language. Her images include people and bodies--clothed, naked, eyes, hands, heads,
legs, and torsos. Her imagery is always accompanied by language, often derived from
such literary figures as Emily Dickinson, Salvador Espriu, and Tom Sleigh, among others.
Dill sees words as revelatory through visual depiction or incantation, prayer, and
song. Words are a force field of connection of social space and personal interiority.
Dill also conceived and directed a full-scale opera based on the poems of Emily Dickinson, called Divide Light, which opened in August 2008 at the Montalvo Arts Center, Saratoga, Calif. A film of the opera, Divide Light, by filmmaker Ed Robbins, premiered in New York City in April 2009.
Dill’s work has been widely exhibited and can be found in the collections of de Young Museum, San Francisco, Calif.; Albright Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, N.Y.; American Consulate, Geneva, Switzerland; Arkansas Arts Center, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Museum of Modern Art, all in New York City, among others.
Her many recognitions include a Falk Visiting Artist Residency at the University of
North Carolina at Greensboro, 2014-15; the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design,
SGC International Lifetime Achievement in Printmaking Award, 2013; and fellowships
from the New York Foundation for the Arts (drawing) and the National Endowment for
the Arts (sculpture).
Artist Susan Rabinowitz Malloy earned a B.S. in art from Skidmore in 1945. Her work
has appeared in numerous group and solo shows in New York and Connecticut. In 1991
Malloy endowed Skidmore’s Malloy Visiting Artist Lecture series, which annually brings
to campus distinguished contemporary artists of international stature.
