Laddie John Dill was born in Long Beach, California, in 1943. He graduated from the Chouinard Art Institute in 1968 with a BFA. After graduating, Dill became a printing apprentice and worked closely with established artists, such as Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, and Jasper Johns. A Los Angeles artist, Dill had his first solo exhibition in New York City with Sonnabend Gallery in 1971. He was one of the first Los Angeles artists to exhibit Light and space work in New York. He exhibited in the Light Sentences and Light Plains in institutions across the United States and globally, and has enjoyed a resurgence of interest in these pieces in the last decade as well, including a recent acquisition of a Light Plains sculpture by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It is currently on view in the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. Dill has been crafting light and earthly materials like concrete, glass, sand, and metal into luminous sculptures, wall pieces, and installations since the 1970s. Referring to his choice of materials, Dill explains: “I was influenced by (Robert) Rauschenberg, Keith Sonnier, Robert Smithson, Dennis Oppenheim and Robert Irwin, who were working with earth materials, light and space as an alternative to easel painting. When Dill does use canvas, he paints with pigments derived from cement and natural oxides. Noted art critic and writer for The New York Times, Ken Johnson, has stated: “At the end of the 60s, the West Coast Light and Space artist Laddie John Dill began producing electric light works out of custom made, blown-glass tubes in a lush palette of jewel-bright colors. Some are made of many short pieces, some of longer parts and fewer colors. They glow beautifully like strings of illuminated glass beads. Dill called these works Light Sentences, likening the segments of color to words grouped in phrases and sentences. This suggests that light itself could be a transcendental language. But the effect of these works in concert is less verbal and more like trippy visual chamber music. Dill’s works are in the permanent collections of national and international institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; the Museum of Contemporary Art, California; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California; the High Museum, Atlanta; The Phillips Collection, Washington DC; the Chicago Art Institute, Illinois; the Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC; the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark; the Pio Monte della Misericordia, Italy; the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, California; and Museo Jumex, Mexico. He currently lives and works in Venice, California, where he maintains a studio.