Wild Grace This Private Hallucinatory Moment
Arthur Roger Gallery, New Orleans
December 6, 2025 - February 13, 2026

Lesley Dill’s Wild Grace This Private Hallucinatory Moment, showcased at Arthur Roger Gallery in New Orleans from December 6th, 2025 to February 13th, 2026, is a result of the artist’s research conducted with the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Museum of American History as a 2023-2024 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow. The exhibition examines themes of language, healing, and the charged space between the seen and unseen.

Dill investigates themes to harness “unseen energies” for healing throughout history by scientists, doctors, medical quacks, and artists alike. The work binds into unity the ideas of self-taught American artists and the world of science and electricity. In consultation with curators at the Smithsonian, Dill explored medical history, including artifacts and illustrations of early inventions which aspired to heal using invisible energies like magnetism, light rays, and x-rays.

The discovery in this research was a huge questing world of intense personal commitment to discovery in both art & science. Self-taught artists whose influences were drawn from include James Castle, Martin Ramirez, Bill Traylor, Tom Uttech, Sister Gertrude Morgan, Howard Finster, James Hamden, Emery Blagdon, Ionel Tapazam, and Alice Eugenia Ligon. Dill found that artists & scientists alike, especially in the mid-1800s to mid-1900s, became obsessed with experimentation and making of gizmos, drawings, and sculpture parks. Art was no longer the sole reliquary of invisible powers and mysterious energies. Electricity became the signature science of the time, and both art and science crossed the boundaries of the private mind into the public one of museum and hospital.

Images are cut from thin foil in a range of dark to light patina, inspired by the above artists, as well as electricity, magnetism, modes of healing, and nature. The cut-out copper images are combined with mulberry paper, hand stenciled with Emily Dickinson poetry.