#JesuitMuseums: Saint Louis University (MOCRA)
AJCU’s #JesuitMuseums series is back for the summer! Today’s post on Lesley Dill’s Anne Hutchinson Is Present comes from the Museum of Contemporary Religious Art (MOCRA) at Saint Louis University.
Lesley Dill (b. 1950), Anne Hutchinson Is Present, 2018, ink, paper, and thread on Tyvek-backed fabric, MOCRA collection, M2021–0001.
The visionary words of Anne Hutchinson, a central figure in an early religious and political conflict in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, radiate from this intimate work by Lesley Dill. Working at the intersection of language and fine art in printmaking, sculpture, installation and performance, Dill is deeply interested in language, faith and spirituality, and the possibility of awakening viewers to the physical intimacy and power of language itself.
Outspoken and unafraid to court controversy, Anne Hutchinson convened weekly meetings at her home at which she articulated theological positions that put her at odds with the colony’s religious and political leaders (and also challenged the patriarchal social order). Put on trial in 1637, she asserted that her knowledge came directly from God: “So to me by an immediate revelation . . . By the voice of his own spirit to my soul.” Hutchinson was banished from Massachusetts; she died in 1643 in New Netherland (now New York) in an attack by the indigenous Siwanoy.
Anne Hutchinson Is Present, a recent addition to the MOCRA collection, reflects Dill’s exploration of the lives and writings of American poets, speakers, religious visionaries, and abolitionists. Combining imagery with stenciled words, these works elicit themes of contradiction and excess and ecstasy, activism and terrorism, stillness and chaos, repression and freedom, madness and sanity. A major exhibition of Dill’s recent work, Wilderness: Light Sizzles Around Me, is on display at the Figge Art Museum in Davenport, Iowa, through August 22, 2021, and will travel to multiple subsequent venues.
Contributed by David Brinker, Director of the Museum of Contemporary Religious Art at Saint Louis University.
