Lesley Dill (American, b. 1950)
Lest the Blaze Should Torch my Hand: Heavenly Mother Ann Lee
2022
color screen print, relief, and collage with colored silver leaf and thread printed at Tandem Press, University of Wisconsin-Madison
The Albert P. Strietmann Collection
2023.23

Lesley Dill works in various mediums, including printmaking, sculpture, installation, and performance. She uses language uniquely and boldly in her print (above) that honors Mother Ann Lee (1736–1784), the founder of the Shakers. The illiterate daughter of a blacksmith in Manchester, England, Lee came to lead a group of religious dissidents called the “Shaking Quakers,” known for their ecstatic forms of worship.  Violating the Church of England’s tenets, they immigrated to the American Colonies in 1774. Convinced that the Divine was available to all who took up Christ’s spirit, the Shakers worshiped in the form of wild dancing and loud singing, balanced by a life of celibacy and long hours of labor. The believers lived in eighteen communal villages from Maine to Kentucky. After Mother Ann Lee’s death, she communicated spiritually with members, resulting in the hymns and drawings of the natural and heavenly worlds that inspired this print.

Lesley Dill (American, b. 1950)
Sojourner Truth: Orator, Abolitionist, Feminist
2022
color screen print, relief, and collage with thread printed at Tandem Press, University of Wisconsin-Madison
The Albert P. Strietmann Collection
2023.22

“Sojourner Truth is a heroine sewn inside America’s stain of slavery who escaped and shaped herself into a leader and a speaker of the truth before thousands … An Abolitionist, An Orator, a Visionary woman of deep spirituality, a preacher, a woman at the very roots of the women’s rights movement, ‘I am a self-made woman.’” —Lesley Dill

Sojourner Truth was born  in 1797 in Hurley, New York. She spent the first 28 years of her life as an enslaved person. As “property,” at age ten, she was sold for $100 and some sheep.  Her 1883 obituary in the New York Globe read: “Sojourner Truth stands preeminently as the only colored woman who gained a national reputation on the lecture platform in the days before the Civil War.” Sojourner Truth delivered her best-know speech, “Ain’t I a Woman,” in 1851 at the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio.”