 Hello everyone. Thank you all for coming. Welcome to the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. Today's lecture, as many of you know, is presented as part of the Helene Zuckersiemann Memorial Endowment. Let me tell you a little bit about Helene. She was an art lover, a contemporary art expert, and a great champion and mentor to many artists. Her career began at the Louis Meisel Gallery in Soho, and in 1978 she co-authored the book Soho, a guide to the community. This book is now classified as historical documentation of Soho. She later researched and documented a second book entitled Photorealism. For 23 years, she served as the director of the art acquisition program at Prudential, where she put together one of the great corporate art collections in America. In the years before her untimely death, she enjoyed being an adjunct professor at NYU and a very active private art advisor. Helene did everything with great enthusiasm and unbridled joy. She was a shining light to her family and to all those who knew her. I am proud to have been her friend, as many in the audience today are. One of those friends is our speaker today, Leslie Dill. Helene followed Leslie's career for many years and remained fascinated with her work. She loved the fact that it was both whimsical and deep, that it was poetic yet concrete, and while informed by words, it remained visually rich, nuanced and ambitious. Leslie Dill is recognized for using a variety of media and techniques to explore themes of language, body and transformational experience through sculpture, photography and performance. Her work has been widely exhibited. She's had over 100 solo exhibitions. She's included in the collections of the High Museum in Atlanta, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Modern Museum in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the De Young Museum in San Francisco, and the National Museum of Women in the Arts in D.C., among many others. In 2009, the Hunter Museum in Chattanooga, Tennessee organized a 15-year survey of Leslie's work, and her show, Poetic Visions, curated by Barbara Madalski, is touring through 2013. Known for her performance work, Divide Light, a non-traditional opera by Dill based on the poems of Emily Dickinson, premiered at the Montalvo Artist Center in Saratoga, California in 2008. Leslie's represented by George Adams Gallery, New York, where she has an exhibit that just opened, and I recommend to you all, called Faith and the Devil, which also premieres a new musical collaboration with vocalist-composer Pamela Ordinez. She is also represented by Arthur Roger Gallery in New Orleans. Leslie has been the recipient of many awards over the years, but one I found very interesting. It's called The Anonymous Was a Woman Award, which gives her, I think, special credence for her appearance here today at the Sackler Center for Feminist Art. She has an upcoming exhibit at the Ducordoba in the spring of 2014. I so admire Leslie's work for being, I admire her work, and I admire Leslie for being a non-stop explorer and master of materials. She uses whatever it takes to bring an idea to fruition, sculpture, photography, drawing, printmaking, or performance, and she imbues it with a kind of philosophical magic. Leslie, please come up and share your work with us. I'm sure it. Thank you, Marilyn. That was so beautiful. I guess that about wraps it up. I know, so Fred Seaman is here and his son, Ford, is here, and I know this is wonderful and also painful to hear. We all love and still love Helene so much. Helene in my life is a yes, and to lead one's life in the form of a yes is tricky. So when you can find people that support that yes-ness, you cherish and you treasure them and you hold them in your heart forever. So what we're going to do here is I'm going to show you a seven-minute clip of selections from the opera Divide Light that I did in California. And I want to tell you that it's only seven minutes. So that when you're three and a half minutes into it and you sneak a look at your watch and you think, oh my God, it's an opera. Is this going to be like 110 minutes long? And then she's going to talk. I want to tell you no, it's not. It's just seven minutes and then after that, look at the split, I'll go into my talk about my work over the last, you know, decades. Okay. Divide Light, if you meet while cubes in a drop, or pellets of shape, fits, builds, cannot undo, orders return, hold, force, play, and with a blunt push over your importance, let's steam. Stessy and stessy and stessy and die. The right outfits for the right emotions for when I go out in the world. I mean, I had to think a lot, even what I was going to wear today, you know, black, yes, no. So I started making clothing as a kind of protection for the human persona. And in this dress, you can't read her when she's closed. You can only read her when she's open. And the poem, Emily Dickinson, dare you see a soul at the white, no, no, no, not yet. I heard as if I had no ear until a vital word came all the way from life to me. And then I knew I heard. When I was living in India, I drank a lot of tea. And I was working with cheery Cozo paper I'd brought from New York. And I thought, let me make a small little dress, a small vulnerable little dress, and stain it with the tea, a color of the country that I'm living in. And I thought, you know, maybe this color is a very good global color. If you were to put all our skin colors in a blender, maybe this would be what would come out. Now, I say that because sometimes at the end of a talk, people will say, oh Leslie, why don't you use your own words? And the aforementioned is an example of why it's not a good idea. So, you know, so I made her and I embroidered her with horse hair again with an Emily Dickinson poem. I am alive, I guess. I am alive, I guess. But, you know, I like guys and I thought she was a little lonely. So I made her boyfriend and this boyfriend is based on a guy I knew for a little bit at the end of high school. And of course, when my mom is in the audience, I always say grad school. Because, because I wanted to address the idea of gender difference. And you know, at that time at 18, I had always thought that gender differences were in that mysterious genital place, the unknown other genital. And when I went out with Marvin, Marvin was one of those guys that had hair that started up here and then it went all the way down to his ankles. And being a rather pink and hairless person myself, I was quite interested and amazed at this masculine hair suit-ness. And you know, it informs why I would use horse hair and threads from this early imprinted dating experience. But I come to think of men quite affectionately since then, having done a dedicated study, forgive me, of male hair patterns through the years. And I found that I think of men now as snowflakes because no to our life. Now, my belief in words is very strong and my feeling is that if you were to cut us open, if you were to cut us open what would fall out would not be our pancreas and just our intestines. What actually would fall out would be words. The words that actually meet air in our lifetimes are few. Compared to the unlipped and untung words that we hold inside. A secret told ceases to be a secret. Those are copper lips up there and then copper teeth underneath with the words. So the process of making language itself is an essentially warm and human animal thing. Just to talk to you this afternoon, I have all these thoughts lined up in me like Boeing 707s, but to make them happen I have to bring them up somewhere here in my body to wrap my breath around the thought, to bring it up past my throat, my teeth, my tongue, my lips out into the air, onto your skin, into your ears and into your body. And I therefore think that the spoken or sung human word is one of the most important ways of communicating. And I know that you do know that this is true because the instant your cell phone rings, which I hope doesn't happen right this minute, but the instant your phone rings and the person on the other end goes, hi, and you know they are your mother, your father, your son, your beloved, your hated person. In that single envelope of air, every cell in your body knows who that is, that hi. You wake up and it's through sound. I am afraid to own a body, I am afraid to own a soul. Again Dickinson, this is how I started out, I am afraid. In India, my Indian women friends would henna my hands and feet and their hands and feet on special occasions with temporary tattoos of henna. And it really influenced me in coming back to New York. And I thought, how great, what a wonderful metaphor for the feeling that the words that we hold inside are staining through continuously from the inside of our bodies to the outside. So I did, I had people come out, friends come over and I would paint them head to toe with words, no Photoshop, and then photograph them and make a print and paint on them images of the heart or words close, close to their skin and their body. And this was the first piece that I made when I was living in India. Moving there and living there for almost two years, I learned a little Hindi, but not enough. And it was the first time that I'd ever been in a country, I don't know if you have ever been in a country where you can't read the writing, you can't understand what's being said, and there you are, alone with sound, you have no control over, because you don't know what it means. So I strained and tried, then I let go. And when I let go, the melodic musicality of human language in writing and in speech rose up and I was free and companion by this. And it has affected my work to this day, this kind of melodic unintelligibility in reading or in listening. Also I use the color white for this piece. I am a northern girl, I grew up in Maine, I thought white was a really cold color, but if you live through to 120 degree New Delhi summers, white becomes a shimmering hot color and the air is filled with the secret sound of Hindi swarming around you every day, night and morning. Also in India, it is a country that is devoted to a belief in the importance of the word, be it in prayers or mantras or pujas or especially in prayer flags. So again when I came back, I thought, oh, this I can maybe do something like that, taking big pieces of fabric, putting a photo on it with language. Now I did think, forgive me India, I thought that maybe it was a little naive that's putting words on flags and thinking that this language would go out into the air and do good things. But I think no, I think it is valid because of the sound, you know, the invisible sound formations that happen. Also, you know there is such a thing as drive by words. I was driving towards Seattle a little while ago and you know here in New York you also have that experience where you are walking down the street and you really don't want to, but the words that are somewhere on signage come into your body and you just really don't want them there, but they are there. So I noted this in this car ride to Seattle because there are a couple of phrases. One was carpet liquidators. I thought, oh my god, this is like textile destruction house. This is terrible. But then I got in that mode and then you know you go on to things like Jiffy Lou. But then you even see Burger King and all I could think of was some ground chalk king standing sky high. So I don't know, I just think words should be careful what we wear and what we hear and what we listen to. And again, living in India, this is actually a temple that's in Nepal. I went there and stood underneath this ribbon, this metal ribbon. And I had never seen this really much in temples in India. This was in Nepal. So I asked the man standing there. I said, what does this mean, this ribbon? He said, oh madam, that is the tongue of God. You stand here, you say your words and they go up and they go up into the sky and into the ears of God. And I thought, oh wonderful, that this, me, this complicated little messy nobles of flesh down here could like say something or think something and it could be rinsed out by like rising up and going up to the sky. And I'm a very prosaic level. I think this is one reason why I use threads a lot in my work. It just gives you one way to wend yourself into the world of metaphor. Example, these saw visions latched them softly. Okay, here's Larry, horse hair embroidered on the bottom. In India, I got my hair cut and when you get your hair cut, you get a hair head oil massage. So you lie down. This is not this gentle Swedish massage. This is a like whack massage, like bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, like that. Or that's what I got that day. And at the end of it, the woman, she said, close your eyes and I closed my eyes and she took her two hands and the very tips of her fingers. She said, clear eyes. I closed my eyes. And she started to gently with the most perfect exquisite touch to massage the pupils of my eyes through the eyelids. And it just felt like, one, I thought, oh my God, no one has ever touched me there before. And then I also thought, oh, this feels so good. As if all these images and loaded in my eyes are being released through this fingertip experience. And you too can do this at home after the talk. I often use those same words with different materials and different images. These saw visions latched them softly, thinking of words again, more like a song, a prayer, a mantra, over and over again in different contexts. A desire for secret rhythms, Kafka. Take all away from me, but leave me ecstasy, Emily Dickinson. All my photos are not there in real life. So my assistant Jen was lying on the floor with her hand up and candles wired to her hand and the flames dripping hot waxed on her hand. We started to call them the SNM, you know, radiant photoshoots. But what I want to say about these two images is that I am a fingertip artist who is obsessed by touch. I think in a way we are societally deprived of touch. All day long, so many of us spend all day behind a computer or in front of a computer screen. Then we get on the subway and we check our iPhones. And then we go home and we turn TV on to relax. And then for a special occasion on the weekend, maybe we go to a movie. So much of life happens behind a screen. But we as human animals, we feel and smell and bite and touch. We have so many organs of feelings. We are not fish outside the fishbowl. We are living inside the fishbowl. Our lives are inside the fishbowl. We are like glasses of water in the ocean. I sent this photo to my mother and from India and told her I'd found a new guy. She was not thrilled. But it does look sort of like a match.com date that maybe shouldn't have happened. But I use this photo and this experience as a way to introduce my craving for the mysteries and the unknowable things of life. Going to the uncomfortable place is only uncomfortable until you are there for a longer time. So I was invited to do a community art project in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. I, of course, being inspired by my friendship with Helene, said yes. So I say yes. I, Helene, did so many things. So I said yes. I had no idea. I'll try to get more intimate with the mic. Okay. I had no idea what I was going to do. And then I remembered that I had a secret. I had a secret that I had never spoken about ever. And it happened when I was a 14-year-old girl growing up in Maine. And this is what it was. I was getting up to go to school and the sky was getting light with the leaves against the sky. So my vision was occluded with a huge blackness and struck through that blackness were like white streamers and things. I heard and saw the word pestilence, war, roughage, desolation. It was like a big black movie that was going on in this vision. But the other thing that happened in this vision was that this experience of pestilence and sorrow was actually overlaid and imprinted with feelings of rapture and bliss, which at the time at 14, I hadn't come nowhere near any concept of rapture and bliss in my life. So I got up to go to school, immediately forgot it, totally forgot the whole thing. And then I went to college. And then there was a class offered called Ecstasy. I was like, you know, really, who would not take that for credit? So I took it and the professor said, okay, here's a questionnaire. How many of you have had experiences you can't explain? How many of you have had a visionary experience that you don't understand? Where time has stood still or something you felt or seen something that you've never had. And then I remembered. It came to me like a swoon. And even though I'm an eager, obedient student, I did not raise my hand because I sat there thinking, oh my God, maybe I'm crazy. You know, so I never spoke about it really again until then decades later when I thought, let me see. I thought, let me go down south. I mean, I bet down south it's, I bet they know about things like spontaneous revelatory experiences. So let me go down and see what they have to say. So I went down there and I went everywhere with a wonderful education curator. And we went to Barnes & Noble, high schools across town, churches. This is the spiritual choir of the Emanuel Baptist Church, which ended up being sort of my home for this project. We did billboards, you see, the normal way to take a photographic image from we older people. There's Melinda and Angie. And here's a billboard with someone's language. Small changes change who I am, change who I want to be. I have left my body twice. I began to spin head over heels slowly. This was one of the curators. My name was called in darkness, I see, Reverend Mendes. Experience left me and I felt weightless. We install these billboards. I think it's called Route 55 and it's the road that traditionally divides the white from the black section of town in Winston-Salem. And also, the last thing is during the exhibition, the spiritual choir came to Sika, to the museum, and they had folded in the language of the community and married it to their traditional gala songs so that when you went there and heard them sing and you were part of the project, you heard your songs being sung back to you by this spiritual choir. This is another costume I did for another performance piece that we don't have time for you to see. But there it is. And Larry Goldhuber and Heidi Latsky invited me to join them and I made that skirt for Larry because I think guys don't get enough chance in our culture to wear skirts. So I made it really long and that's Heidi and me being dragged across the stage so much fun by Larry. And there's Heidi dancing with the first of projected images that I used. And there's Larry, the guy himself. And here are costumes from the opera, the fabulous Jorge. If we have time I'll tell you stories. And here's Andrew, the incredible baritone, who every day after rehearsal would come up to me like this, he would say, he's sung at the Met and around the country. And he said, oh my God, Leslie, I've never sung the word sperm before. I said, oh, get a grip, Andrew, you're doing a fine job. So here are more images, another dress. I didn't show you this was the finale dress, ecstasy. And here's the incredible string quartet, fabulous, based on San Francisco. And there's Kathleen, the mezzo, fabulous voice. And there we all are. Now, this took a lot of time. It took three years going back and forth to Colorado, working with different singers, composers, etc. So myself and my studio, we were tired. So, now Sarah, did you help with this next part? I think so. All right, yeah. Okay, so what does one do when you are exhausted from overwork? All right, here's my living room. These are the two dogs that we borrow in our house. Claudia is a big one and Aki is a little one. So I thought, let's make costumes for Claudia and Aki. Let's make Aki look like Claudia and we'll make Claudia look like Aki. So, ready? Here comes, here's Claudia and here's Aki. Right? That's good. Here's Claudia as Aki, looking very happy. Here's Aki as Claudia, not looking very happy. Something between Marat's sod and wounded soldier is what I would say. Anyway, I just include this. It's sort of a wind down. And then wound up again from a wonderful invitation from Gail Deere at the Maryland Institute printmaking department. And Scott Skinner from the Draken Kite Foundation. And we, the printmaking department and I, we worked together to make a 14 foot kite called Divide Light. So, you know, you think divide light, how does that happen? Well, the kite was perfect because just by its very nature, just by being alive when we walk out in the sunshine, we divide light as does a kite. And there it goes. So after that, that combined with my experience with music, I am very interested in things that rise up. So I did this piece at the New Burger Museum with the language collected from the spiritual choir from their songs and emitting from her back seated there. And of course, I have to go back to India to the original inspiration of the incredible fabrics that you find there. And let me go back there. Now that would be a very good image for the Sackler Museum, I think. You know, women, strong women, yeah. Okay. Then in the same exhibit, I did a little guy with hundreds of figures from around the world emitting from his back that 20 feet high by 65 feet. As if we as human beings are sitting on thousands and hundreds of years of people come before us. And here's a sample of the metal figure and close-up that went into that piece. Sarah, one of my beloved assistants is here and she's probably feeling very tired just looking at this. Okay. Very tired, I'm sure, she's feeling. So then we did shimmer of kind of a puzzle-like waterfall of electrical wire. We used 2,592 feet of different kinds of wire for this. Your accounting studio. And now I'm going to show you a few bronzes and then a few things and then we are done. And you can ask me anything you want or not, or go. So this is a life-size piece called Rapture's Germination. And you'll see, okay, hold that and then, ah, I've done a number of pieces that are bronze with holes because I think when we listen to music, we open. We open up without thinking. Our whole bodies open up when we listen to music. It's not just our ears. And here is a guy, a big guy. And here is a woman, a bronze also. And here's a new bronze piece. It's actually up at the National Museum now, up in here in New York. And then this is called a Perfect Paralyzing Bliss. So up here I get to confide all strange things to you. So I was on a Buddhist retreat and I had, you know, ten minutes of this utter suspended feeling of bliss and rapture that I hadn't had as purely for a really long time. I thought, ah, that feels great. Eight hours later, it did not feel so great. It felt like a kind of spiritual viagra that I've never used. But, you know, it was like a state that was sustained for a very long time. I've since learned how to manage that. But, and then I went little. Here's little bronze guy. Here's little seven headed paper guy. Here's little breath, little teeny teeny guy. Jump, dazzle. Spit bite. Walking man. And this guy, big guy leaping off the wall with Kafka on him. Was he an animal that music had such an effect on him? Yes, he was. And then I did a show in New Orleans that was called Word Queens. And I have been so lucky in my life to know so many strong women and one of them was, was, is my friend and mentor Nancy Sparrow, who's dead now. But she would always tell me to amp up. Never apologize. Never speak for women. And in her own work, early on when I met her, I learned, oh, a woman can be the center of a story. A woman can be a center of the story and not necessarily be a victim that's the center of the story. So I wanted to do this show called Word Queens. And I did these in, I don't know, 2006 or something. This one is in Romania. And then this most recent show, and then this is almost it, Arthur in New Orleans invited me to do an installation down there. And so I researched and found that Sister Gertrude Morgan lived and did her spiritual work in New Orleans as a street preacher. So this whole installation was an homage to the biography of Sister Gertrude. She called the show Hell, Hell, Hell, Heaven, Heaven, Heaven, Encountering Sister Gertrude Morgan and Revelation. She was a very black and white spiritual person. And then there are necklaces. And it's her biography. The necklaces are big, a sort of homage to New Orleans. And in her vision that she had, she had a vision that she was meant to devote her life to the spiritual calling. And she, in her vision, she became the bride of Jesus. So I made her, I made in this exhibit, I made this dress on a figure in homage to Sister Gertrude with that helm. And this is from one of the drawings. And what she says is, My heart shall not fear the war should rise against me. My heart shall not fear the war should rise against me. Now, here we are in present day. I want to take this opportunity to publicly thank my many interns and assistants who have worked with me over the years. The generosity of these young women and their ideas is limitless. And they are fabulous people. And this is a show that's up now at George Adams Gallery. So there are just a few funky slides. So here's his team we had. Here is Elma, me and Maxine. And Sarah is the other person who should be in this photo, planning, planning, thinking. And we, you know, there are some disadvantages to having a camera in the studio. You just can't resist taking certain shots. But this was not posed. This is an actual photo. I mean, an actual experience. Right, Sarah? Uh-huh. Okay. And here we are at George Adams installing the show Faith and the Devil. A week and a half ago. Here is drunk with a great starry void. And here is big gal Faith. And there is little evil Lucifer. And forgiveness, which is really a... Forgiveness is, I found, was the toughest one to work on. That one is lust. Easy. There's Lucifer. Last slide. This is Kafka. Faith, like a guillotine, as heavy as light. Now, faith is not a soft bunny of a word that describes slinky, jelly-like people preying on the floor to indoctrination. Faith is a strong, big word. The word faith, by its very nature, encompasses the incomprehensibility of evil, of murder, unmentionable acts of cruelty and rape. And these acts of evil coexist with thoughtfulness, reflection, and potentially even illumination. So I think, in general, for our lives, big, brave heart, big, brave mind, big, brave story. Thank you very much. Because I'm so wanting to tell you all these funny stories. So actually it was, you know, I was only 45 minutes altogether. Okay, I'm sorry. Are there any questions or thoughts? No need. Thank you, Fred. Yes, fellow artist, woman, Leslie Wayne, wonderful painter. Sorry. I love it. I never knew that some of those like that tone of the temple was such a specific influence. And it's really interesting because we all look for information to take back to the studio. You're right. And I'm really impressed when you took those, just bits of visual and some information and then they... Thank you, sweetie. Another artist, another artist. This is a wonderful thing. I don't keep talking a little bit more about... And you can leave if you want to. Go ahead. How the poetry informs the visual image or how the visual image demands the particular words? You know, I always... Did you hear the question, how does the visual... I always forget kind of to mention that in the talk because I get so carried away with the verb of life. And so this is what happened to me. So my mother, when I was 40, you know, as artists, you know, working, making art, some good, some not really great. My mom sent me this book of Emily Dickinson Poetry. It's really big and thick and I thought, oh, this... I don't even like poetry. I'm down at the bottom of the page before it comes into my body. Give me a prose. And I thought, all right, but because it's my mother, you know, of course, I will read it. So what happened is I opened the book and then like my kind of electric blue frogs, these words, like, I felt my life with both my hands to see if it was there. Like jumped up into my body. Whoa, shut the book. And then I opened the book again. I felt my life with both my hands to see if it was there. Did I just say that one? I did. See, I get lost in that. The soul has bandaged moments into my body. A wounded deer leaps highest. I've heard the hunter tell, bam, into the body. So I learned that I was affected by certain kinds of language, like a boom, boom, boom. And it was starting because the reading of the words actually then brought with them ideas for making artwork. So they came like fully loaded, like charged seed pods of connected words with an idea. And then with the train of the permission to use language in the work. I mean, I've always been a reader, but I'd never had this kind of almost experiential effect with language. You know, with four or five words linked together as a thing that comes up. So it was so strong that I just, and I was so dumb. You know, you don't know that this is going to become your whole life when you start with an inspiration. You don't know. You know, you don't know when you meet a guy. You know, like you have a date with this guy on a drink. You don't know that in a few years you're going to have three children with him. You know, it's things like that. So it continued to affect me. And I can't read late at night. I do research at different times. So it used to be the words would secrete the image and the idea. And then later on it became that I would get an idea and we need to be closed or I would start to match up. You know, as it became more of a world, a world of imagery and language and I became more confident in it. And it became more natural. Now it just stays kind of swim with it in many different ways. Pamela, the singer-composer who we are having a new collaboration with, we've been working for the last many months on just swimming with language and making songs from that. So does that go close to it? So it is the power of belief in the power of the word. In the power even of a single letter. Look, history. Her whole life ruined by one letter. Yes? Yes. Yes, Gracie. How many different writers have you used? Not too many. But for this new project of George's, I was poetically monogamous to Emily Dickinson for seven years. And then I strayed to Neruda, South Dark Esprit, behind just a few people. It would have a similar structure that would have the jump up frog thing happen. And then as I got more fluent with that, this show that's up now is from Dante, Milton, and also my good friend Tom Slay, who I'm a couple of artists here in the audience have also used his fabulous poetry. Maybe 12, 10, 12. Not too many. I still don't really like poetry. It just hits you, you know? Have you had such loyalties to Emily? I did. Was it hard to wriggle her? Well, I use it as a patterning device. A little joy, a lot of ecstasy, and some poison. Seems to work. That's my goodest. Thank you so much.