This week, GBH Executive Arts Editor Jared Bowen joined Morning Edition's Jeremy Siegel to discuss two new local art shows.
Lesley Dill, "Wilderness: Light Sizzles Around Me"
On view at Canterbury Shaker Village, 188 Shaker Road, Canterbury, N.H., through Sept. 12.
Visual artist Lesley Dill uses prose and poetry as prompts for her work, Bowen said. In this show, she investigated visionary characters throughout American history: Shaker founder Mother Ann Lee; Sauk leader Black Hawk; and abolitionists Sojourner Truth, Dred Scott and John Brown. She also examined author Nathaniel Hawthorne and his character from “The Scarlet Letter,” Hester Prynne.
“[Dill] investigates their words, and she creates these figurative sculptures in the personages, representation of a person and in terms of their clothing,” Bowen said. “And then she fuses their words in both banners and then on their clothing. So you're really diving into the person by way of words that describe them or words they wrote.”
Dill said she drew inspiration from the poetry of Emily Dickinson.
“My body of work as an artist comes through the doorway of the poetry of Emily Dickinson. I have and had worked with her words, her extraordinary, intense words from this small, little woman,” Dill said. “These words caused a flame to rise up in me, and inspirations for artwork were literally born from her words.”
Dill told Bowen that when she was 14, she had a vision in which everything around her blacked out and she saw only a notion of the world. “It is fused into her art,” Bowen said. “And it just makes it even more interesting as you look at these figures and figure out where they're coming from, and the circumstances in which they had to move forward in the world for really finding justice in the case of most of these figures.”
Cliff Notez x Jaypix, "wiild negro is love"
On view at the Cultural Equity Incubator, 15 Channel Center St., Boston, through June 27.
The Cultural Equity Incubator is giving artists of color more support in a time where some of them are getting more attention, Bowen said. The incubator can offer space for self-care for artists scaling up their work, introductions to insurance and law experts, and a gallery space.
Currently, that gallery space hosts documentary photographer Jaypix's images of musician and artist Cliff Notez.
“You start in this series by seeing a figure whose face is kind of buried,” Bowen said. “You see this frenzy of emotion, and then it gradually evolves into Cliff Notez as this golden statue — of course, gold … also means abundance and prosperity, luxury and quality, sophistication and elegance. So you see the transition.”
Jaypix has often worked in “trying to create a feeling and rather than just a moment, trying to transcend times in which people are othered in this world,” Bowen said.
“There are so many social constructs that try to have us limit ourselves and stick to different boxes, whether it's gender or race,” said Slandie Prinston, liberatory artist coordinator at the incubator. “That aspect of having a space and having a community interested in exploring what radical transformation can look like. That's one thing that feels exciting.”
