This lavishly illustrated book features a body of new works by renowned American artist Lesley Dill.

Lesley Dill is an American artist working at the intersection of language and fine art, combining printmaking, sculpture, installation, and performance to explore the power of words in revealing the souls of important historical personas. Lesley Dill—Wilderness features a uniquely inspired group of sculptures and two-dimensional works more than a decade in the making. It is a testament to Dill’s ongoing investigation into the significant voices and personas of America’s past, such as Mother Ann Lee, John Brown, the Sauk war leader Mà-ka-tai-me-she-kià-kiàk (Black Hawk), Walt Whitman, Sojourner Truth, and others. For the artist, the American voice grew from early America’s obsessions with divinity and deviltry, on fears of the wilderness out there and the wilderness inside each of us and the struggles between.

The plates, in color throughout, are supplemented with essays by Lesley Dill, Brooklyn-based writer Nancy Princenthal, Figge Art Museum’s curator Andrew Wallace, and researcher and tribal historian Juaquin Hamilton-YoungBird. The book also features poems by writer and poet Tom Sleigh and the renowned Meskwaki author and poet Ray Young Bear.

The Figge Art Museum, formed as the Davenport Municipal Art Gallery in 1925, was given its current name in 2005 on the occasion of the opening of its new building designed by British architect David Chipperfield. It is home to an impressive collection of European, American, and Spanish Viceregal art, the Grant Wood Archive, and works by other American regionalist artists, an extensive collection of Haitian art, and contemporary works.