GMAC will open its fourth exhibition, Laddie John Dill: Paragraph, on May 8, 2025. Curated by Anna Valverde, the exhibition showcases four works made between 1969-2022 from the artist’s celebrated Light Sentence series. This exhibition is organized in conjunction with the Norton Museum of Art, which will concurrently run a solo exhibition on Dill titled Eastern Standard Time. The Norton Museum of Art’s presentation includes two works from the artist’s Light Sentence and Silica Lightscape series, both acquired with funds provided by GMAC’s founder, George Frederick Mead Merck.

The exhibition title, Paragraph, is a structural play on the four Light Sentences that make up the show. The show’s curation mirrors the written structure of a paragraph, organized in a way to help viewers better understand and experience this important body of work. This essay also provides needed scholarship on material aspects of the work that are often misunderstood. The name of the series, ‘Light Sentence,’ derives from Dill’s approach to making these works. His process starts with a graphite sketch of the Light Sentence on graph paper, where he lays out the colors he wants to use inside the handblown glass tube, along with their respective lengths. The glass tubes are typically between 80-90 inches in length, with a consistent diameter of 0.5 inches. It was through reading these sketches that Dill began to see a color sentence shape and thus began referring to them as Light Sentences.