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Artist, Poet, Curator: A Conversation with Lesley Dill, Tom Sleigh and Rene Paul Barilleaux
September 29, 2022
On September 29, 2022, MOCRA welcomed acclaimed visual artist Lesley Dill for a virtual, Zoom-based presentation. Dill was joined by poet Tom Sleigh and Rene Paul Barilleaux, head of curatorial affairs at the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, Texas. MOCRA Director David Brinker guided the conversation.
The event was presented in conjunction with the MOCRA exhibition Lesley Dill: Dream World of the Forest.Lesley Dill (b. 1950) is an American artist working at the intersection of language and fine art in sculpture, printmaking, installation and performance, exploring the power of words to cloak and reveal the psyche. Dill has had over one hundred solo exhibitions. Her artworks are in the collections of many major museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art New York, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 2017 she was named a fellow of The John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and is a Joan Mitchell Foundation Creating A Living Legacy artist and grant recipient. Her opera, Divide Light, based on the poems of Emily Dickinson, was performed in San Jose in 2008. In 2018 the opera was re-staged in New York City and captured in an award-winning film by Ed Robbins. Dill was the recipient of the Emily Dickinson Museum’s 2019 ‘Tell it Slant’ Award.
In her work, Dill transforms the emotions of the writings of Emily Dickinson, Salvador Espriu, Tom Sleigh, Franz Kafka, and Rainer Maria Rilke, among others, into works of paper, wire, horsehair, foil, bronze and music—works that awaken the viewer to the physical intimacy and power of language itself. Dill’s exhibition Wilderness: Light Sizzles Around Me, organized by the Figge Art Museum, is currently traveling to 7 venues through Winter of 2023. The exhibition amplifies voices of the North American past as they wrestle with divinity, deviltry, and freedom, including Mother Ann Lee, Black Hawk, Sojourner Truth, John Brown, Emily Dickinson, Horace Pippin, and Sister Gertrude Morgan. Dill is represented by Nohra Haime Gallery in New York and Arthur Roger Gallery in New Orleans. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Tom Sleigh is the author of eleven books of poetry, including his most recent book, The King’s Touch, from Graywolf Press in February 2022. Other works include Army Cats, winner of the John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and Space Walk, which won the $100,000 Kingsley Tufts Award. In addition, Far Side of the Earth won an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, The Dreamhouse was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and The Chain was a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Prize. Station Zed was published in 2015 and includes his long poem about Iraq, Homage to Basho, a version of which received Poetry Magazine’s Editors Prize. In 2018 a book of prose collecting his essays on refugees in the Middle East and Africa, The Land Between Two Rivers: Writing In An Age Of Refugees, was published simultaneously by Graywolf Press as a companion piece to House of Fact, House of Ruin. He has also published a previous book of essays, Interview With a Ghost, and a translation of Euripides' “Herakles.”
Widely anthologized, his poems and prose appear in The New Yorker, Virginia Quarterly Review, Poetry, American Poetry Review, Yale Review, Threepenny, The Village Voice, and other literary magazines, as well as The Best of the Best American Poetry, The Best American Poetry, Best American Travel Writing, and The Pushcart Anthology. He has received the Shelley Prize from the Poetry Society of America, a Fellowship from the American Academy in Berlin, a Fellowship at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, an Individual Writer's Award from the Lila Wallace/Reader's Digest Fund, a Guggenheim grant, and two National Endowment for the Arts grants, among many others. Sleigh is a Distinguished Professor in the MFA Program at Hunter College and lives in Brooklyn. During the last decade, he has also worked as a journalist in Syria, Lebanon, Somalia, Kenya, Iraq, and Libya.
Rene Paul Barilleaux is Head of Curatorial Affairs at the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, TX, having served as the Museum’s Chief Curator (2006-2016) and Curator of Contemporary Art (2005-2016). Since joining the McNay in 2005, he greatly expanded the postwar and contemporary art collection and organized award-winning exhibitions and publications. The 2019 exhibition Transamerica/n: Gender, Identity, Appearance Today, which he conceived and co-organized, won an Award of Excellence from the Association of Art Museum Curators. Barilleaux received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from The University of Southwestern Louisiana in 1979 and a Master of Fine Arts from Pratt Institute in 1981. In 2015, he was selected as one of twelve Fellows at the Center for Curatorial Leadership in New York. Barilleaux shares his life with his husband, Tim Hedgepeth, a theatre director and drama instructor. Among his favorite artworks in the McNay’s collection is Dario Robleto’s Sundials, More Loyal to the Moon.
above:
Lesley Dill. Photo by George Woodman.
Watch Artist, Poet, Curator: A Conversation with Lesley Dill, Tom Sleigh and Rene Paul Barilleaux
Exhibition | |
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2018-10-07 to 2018-10-14 |
Walking in Hope: A Weeklong Celebration of the Canonization of Archbishop Oscar Romero |
2017-04-20 |
“The Hand Acts Out a Joyous Dance”: Celebrating the Art of Bernard Maisner |
2016-09-25 |
Erika Diettes: “Stories Told from the Threshold” |
2015-12-06 |
So That You Know Each Other: Intercultural Reflections on Art, Beauty, and Islam |
2014-11-15 |
John Handley: “The Religious Art of Pablo Picasso” |
2018-09-28 to 2018-09-29 |
Fleur-de-Lis Floral Art Walk |
2014-02-23 |
“The Economy of Gift” in Socially Engaged Art Practices: A Public Deliberation |
2013-10-02 |
Art21: The Spiritual Light screening at CAM |
2013-03-02 |
Rituals and Spirituality in the Performative Photographic Work of Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons |
2012-11-11 |
Breaking Boundaries: A Conversation about the Art of Patrick Graham |
2012-05-20 |
Stephen P. Durchslag: “The Jewish Experience and the Haggadah” |
2012-03-27 |
2012 Loyola Chair Lecture: “The Image of the Wounded Body of Christ and the Modern Social Consciousness” |
2011-10-06 |
2011 Loyola Chair Lecture: “The Pursuit of the Spirit: The Renewed Interest in the Spiritual and Religious Dimensions in Contemporary Art” |
2011-05-01 |
Terrence Dempsey, S.J.: “Georges Rouault and the Art of Sacred Engagement” |
2010-11-15 |
Terrence Demspey, S.J.: “Creating a Religious Environment through Contemporary Art and Architecture” |
2010-03-28 |
Terrence Dempsey, S.J.: “The Wounded Body of Christ and the Modern Social Conscience” |
2009-12-01 |
Day With(out) Art |
2009-11-15 |
Michael Byron: “Cosmic Tears: Word and Image” |
2009-03-29 |
Art and the Religious Imagination |
2008-04-15 |
Wu Hung: “What Is Contemporary Chinese Art?” |
2007-10-07 |
Celluloid Bible Classics: The Ten Commandments |
2007-11-04 |
Celluloid Bible Classics: Ben-Hur |
2007-09-16 |
Michael Morris, O.P.: “Moving Pictures: The Bible and Beyond” |
2007-03-30 |
Peter Frank: “An Oskar Fischinger Tribute” |
2006-12-01 |
Day With(out) Art |
2005-12-04 |
Robert Rosenblum: “DoDo Jin Ming: An Art Historian's View” |
2003-09-07 |
To Make Extraordinary: The Role of Sacred Objects in Life and Worship |
2002-05-04 |
The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment: A University Response |
2002-04-30 |
Fred D. Gray: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment: A Study That Should Never Have Occurred |
2002-01-31 |
Cloudlanders |
2002-01-26 |
Thomas Sokolowski: “The Last Temptation: Andy Warhols Art as Belief” |
2000-11-30 |
Day With(out) Art |
2001-04-06 |
Bare Naked Statues in concert |
1999-04-15 |
Two Lectures: Ellen Dissanayake and Jack Renard |
1999-03-27 |
Bernard Maisner: “The Art of the Illuminator” |
1998-03-22 |
Renaissance and Modern |
1997-11-15 |
The Role of the Computer in Contemporary Art |
1997-07-24 |
Jennifer Biddle: Body, Country, Canvas: Meaning and Identity in Central Desert Aboriginal Women’s Art |
1997-06-07 |
Creativity as Ancestral Mind: Living with the Ancestors |
1997-02-27 |
The Artist and the Theologian Dialogue: The Body of Christ as Veiling and Unveiling the Invisible God |
1996-12-01 |
Day Without Art |
1996-05-19 |
The Artist as Poet: Readings by Edward Boccia |
1995-05-20 |
Ian Friend: “The Edge of Belief” |
1995-05-04 |
Peter Selz: “Degenerate Art” |
1995-02-05 |
Lynn Hague in recital |
1994-11-13 |
Terrence Dempsey, S.J.: “The Spiritual in Art in the Time of AIDS” |
1994-12-01 |
Day Without Art |
1994-11-05 |
Thomas Sokolowski: “The Changing Face of AIDS” |
1994-11-01 |
The Amici String Quartet in recital |
1994-10-15 |
Consecrations: The Spiritual in Art in the TIme of AIDS dance program and opening reception |
1993-10-29 |
I Remember Alvin |
1993-11-05 |
An Evening with Katherine Dunham |
1992-11-07 |
The Artist and Sacred Space |
2019-04-14 |
A Conversation with Gary Logan |
2019-11-10 |
Pursuing the Spirit in Contemporary Art: A Celebration of Terrence Dempsey, S.J. |
2021-10-26 to 2021-10-26 |
Religion and Complex Social Issues Series: Panel on Immigration, Justice, and Religion |
2021-11-03 to 2021-11-03 |
Sobrevida: A Conversation with Prof. Daisy Vargas |
2021-11-05 to 2021-11-05 |
Meet the Artist: Tom Kiefer |
2021-11-06 to 2021-11-06 |
Conversations with Photographer Tom Kiefer |
2022-04-07 to 2022-04-07 |
Tom Lucas, S.J.: Art in the Jesuit Tradition |
2022-09-29 |
Artist, Poet, Curator: A Conversation with Lesley Dill, Tom Sleigh and Rene Paul Barilleaux |
2022-11-19 |
What Is Viral? What Is Value? — Open Mic |