In honor of Black History Month, Rare Books and Manuscripts is highlighting three pieces by Clarissa Sligh from our contemporary artist’s book collection.
Clarissa Sligh’s work draws on her own experiences and understandings of how events in her life interact with specific moments in history. She explores how these interactions, or what she calls collisions, result in life being altered by external change. She also examines boundaries, identity, transmutation and memory as they are rooted in her experiences.
Her works, a combination of traditional book form and visual art, invite viewers to slow down and to reflect as they encounter the familiar yet unfamiliar pieces before them. The content and meaning derive not only from the printed text on the page but also from the images as well as the full experience of engaging with the material object.
Sligh juxtaposes two stories in "Wrongly Bodied Two" that touch on gender identity, transgender issues and the history of fugitive slaves in the United States. The book opens with her recounting an experience she had during a project photographing masculine women. One of her subjects, Deborah, declared to her, “I am really a man who happens to be in a woman’s body.” At the time, Sligh did not realize the import of this statement.
Many years later, having lived in the Southeast among the vestiges of slavery, Sligh was certain “that white could be black and black could be white.” Then she recalled Deborah's statement. In her experiences of 50 some years, she came to realize that she had never considered “that a male could be a female and a female could be a male.” With this, she introduces Jake’s story, documenting his transformation from Deborah into Jake.
Then Sligh introduces Ellen Craft, a black woman who disguises herself as a white man in the mid-nineteenth century and escapes from enslavement. Woven together are the experiences of both Jake and Ellen as they change their identities, endure the processes and confront society’s responses to those changes. Against this backdrop, the author-artist herself examines her own fears negotiating the boundaries of race, gender and class.
In "What’s Happening with Momma?," Sligh evokes her childhood memories. The book is shaped like her childhood home, a row house with steps—accordion folded strips of paper in this book—at the top of which she sat. She recalls hearing scary noises coming from within.
Sligh engages her viewers to walk through the rooms of this house. As they do so, the engage with the paper stairs, pulling each down, to learn about her memories of when her sister was born in that very house–her momma’s screams; her brother trembling; her rocking back and forth; the stork bringing her new sister.
A beautiful gold-foil crane greets the reader upon opening this book, but don’t be led astray. "Transforming Hate: An Artists Book" intertwines personal stories and historical events, the victims of oppression and violence, the perpetrators of horrific and unconscionable acts.
This book was inspired by a previous project Sligh was invited to participate in. Sponsored by the Montana Human Rights Network that had acquired over 4,000 copies of white supremacist books, the Network sought to transform these pages of hatred into works of art that conveyed positive messages. Sligh's project involved painfully folding individual pages from "The White Man’s Bible" into origami cranes. She chose the cranes, recalling the power that the colorful folded cranes had on her when she visited the Children’s Peace Memorial in Hiroshima.
Through this tour de force, Sligh brings to the forefront her understanding of the many levels of oppression and violence at the intersections of gender, sexual orientation, class and race. She raises questions about who decides who gets what rights and whom society marginalizes. Through her survey of events during her own life, she asks viewers to stop and “to question her or his perceptions about history, reality, identity and voice,” asking, “Do we have the courage to live differently?”
About Clarissa Sligh (1939 – )
In her own words, “I am a black woman. I am an artist.” Through her art, essays and lectures, Clarissa Sligh has brought into public discourse issues of social justice. Her perspective derives from her own experiences. Born in Washington, D.C. and attending school in Virginia, she was the lead plaintiff at the young age of 15 in the 1955 school desegregation case (Clarissa Thompson et al. vs. Arlington County School Board). She went on to earn her BS in Mathematics from Hampton Institute, a historically Black research university in Hampton, VA. She also earned her BFA and MFA in Visual Arts from Howard University and MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Her papers are housed at Duke University, Clarissa Sligh Papers, 1950-2010.
The three artist's books featured as well as others from the collection of contemporary artist's books in Rare Books and Manuscripts may be viewed in the Wurzburger Reading Room. Please contact us through Ask an Archivist.
– Julie Tanaka, Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts