91女神

Lesley Dill

Lesley Dill 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 more than 100 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, 鈥淒ivide Light,鈥� 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鈥檚 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 鈥� works that awaken the viewer to the physical intimacy and power of language itself.

Dill鈥檚 exhibition 鈥淲ilderness: Light Sizzles Around Me,鈥� organized by the Figge Art Museum, is traveling to seven venues through the 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 in New York and Arthur Roger Gallery in New Orleans. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Photo credit: George Woodman

Tom Sleigh

Tom Sleigh is the author of 11 books of poetry, including his most recent book, 鈥淭he King鈥檚 Touch,鈥� from Graywolf Press in February 2022. Other works include 鈥淎rmy Cats,鈥� winner of the John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and 鈥淪pace Walk,鈥� which won the $100,000 Kingsley Tufts Award. In addition, 鈥淔ar Side of the Earth鈥� won an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, 鈥淭he Dreamhouse鈥� was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and 鈥淭he Chain鈥� was a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Prize. 鈥淪tation Zed鈥� was published in 2015 and includes his long poem about Iraq, 鈥淗omage to Basho,鈥� a version of which received Poetry Magazine鈥檚 Editors Prize. In 2018, a book of prose collecting his essays on refugees in the Middle East and Africa, 鈥淭he Land Between Two Rivers: Writing In An Age Of Refugees,鈥� was published simultaneously by Graywolf Press as a companion piece to 鈥淗ouse of Fact, House of Ruin.鈥� He has also published a previous book of essays, 鈥淚nterview With a Ghost,鈥� and a translation of Euripides' 鈥淗erakles.鈥�

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 鈥淭he Best of the Best American Poetry,鈥� 鈥淭he Best American Poetry,鈥� 鈥淏est American Travel Writing,鈥� and 鈥淭he Pushcart Anthology.鈥� 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 M.F.A. Program at Hunter College and lives in Brooklyn, New York. During the last decade, he has also worked as a journalist in Syria, Lebanon, Somalia, Kenya, Iraq and Libya. Photo credit: Annette Hornischer

Rene Paul Barilleaux

Rene Paul Barilleaux is head of curatorial affairs at the in San Antonio, having served as the museum鈥檚 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 collections and organized award-winning exhibitions and publications. The 2019 exhibition 鈥淭ransamerica/n: Gender, Identity, Appearance Today,鈥� 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 12 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鈥檚 collection is Dario Robleto鈥檚 鈥淪undials, More Loyal to the Moon.鈥� Photo credit: J. Huskin