Clarisa Sligh – Transforming Hate | What’s Happening with Momma?
Maier Museum of Art at Randolph College’s 112th Annual Exhibition
Back to Front: Artists’ Books by Women
Clarissa Sligh, Cranes for Transforming Hate, 2022, four strands of origami cranes folded from white supremacist publications, paper beads, thread three strands (15 cranes): 3 ⅜ x 43 in., 3 ⅜ x 40 in., and 3 ⅜ x 43 ½ in.; four-crane strand: 3 ⅜ x 14 in. Courtesy of Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, Cynthia Sears Collection
Clarissa Sligh, Transforming Hate, 2007-present, perfect bound softcover; four-color offset lithography; illustrated paper wrappers with flaps; housed in foldout die-cut box with gold foil origami crane inserted into cover slot, 8 x 8 in. Courtesy of Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, Cynthia Sears Collection
Transforming Hate: An Artist’s Book, one of her best-known works, began at the invitation of the Montana Human Rights Network in Helena, Montana. Inspired by the Children’s Peace Monument in Hiroshima, Sligh decided to fold pages from white-supremacist publications into origami cranes. “While folding cranes, my head, my body hurt from old wounds and scars reopened,” she reveals. In the end, she was able to recast the vitriolic, hateful words into a wish for harmony and peace.
Video: https://vimeo.com/462778417
Clarissa Sligh, What’s Happening With Momma?, 1988, silkscreen, letterpress, 11 ½ x 6 ¼ x 1 ¾ in. Courtesy of Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, Cynthia Sears Collection
What’s Happening with Momma? is a dimensional, house-shaped book that unfolds to tell an autobiographical story from the author. The book is shaped like her childhood home, a row house with steps where she sat as a child hearing scary noises coming from within. Sligh engages her viewers to walk through the rooms of this house to learn about her memories of her sister’s birth – her momma’s screams; her brother trembling; her rocking back and forth; the stork bringing her new sister.
Video: https://vimeo.com/59072764
BIOGRAPHY
Clarissa Sligh is a visual artist, lecturer, and essayist. Her photo-text images, artists’ books and installations have been exhibited in places such as The Museum of Modern Art and the Jewish Museum, New York, NY, Walker Art Center and the Minnesota Center for Book Arts, Minneapolis, MN, The National Gallery of Art and Corcoran Gallery of Art and the National African American Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.
One’s life sometimes collides with moments in history, causing it to be altered dramatically by external change. Certainly this was so for Clarissa Thompson Sligh. When she was 15 years old she became the lead plaintiff in the 1955 school desegregation case in Virginia (Clarissa Thompson et. al. vs. Arlington County School Board). From that moment forward, her work as a student and as a professional – first in math/science working for NASA, later in business, and finally, in the arts – takes into account change, transformation and complication. For over 30 years, Sligh has woven
together the cultural, historical, personal and political to explore concepts of memory and transmutation, and perceptions of boundaries and identity: themes that have roots in her own experiences.
Sligh’s most recent awards were 2016 grants from Art Saves Lives, the Shlenker Block Fund of the Houston Jewish Community Foundation, and the Blue Spiral 1 Gallery. Other awards include an International Center of Photography Annual Infinity Award (1995) and fellowships from Anonymous Was a Woman (2001), the National Endowment for the Arts (1988), the New York Foundation for the Arts in artist’s books (2005) and in photography (1988 and 2000).
Sligh was co-founder, in 1988 of “Coast to Coast National Women Artists of Color Projects”, which traveled exhibitions nationally through 1996. She has worked with organizations including the National Women’s Caucus for Art (1985 to 1994), the Artists Federal Credit Union, New York, (1986 to 1987), Printed Matter (1992 to 1996), the Artists’ Advisory Board of the Women’s Studio Workshop (2004 to 2007), the Artist Advisory Committee, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, (2004 to 2008), and the Penland School of Crafts, (2007 to 2015).