Not many have heard the name Clarissa Sligh. Sligh was the lead plaintiff in a legal desegregation case in Virginia before she went on to work as a mathematician at NASA and later Wall Street before she quit to become an artist. Sligh found her favorite medium, the artist book, and has since used that form to challenge mainstream discourses about social justice movements and reveal the cost that rigid definitions of community-making entails.
Members of the Case Western Reserve University community are invited to join the Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities to learn more about Sligh.
Virginia Thomas, assistant professor of women’s and gender studies and art history at Providence College, will present a talk titled “On the Edge of Representation: Black Feminist Photographic Praxis and Resisting Appropriation in Clarissa Sligh’s Wrongly Bodied/Jake in Transition” Tuesday, Sept. 17, from noon to 1 p.m. in Clark Hall, Room 206.
Thomas will focus on an experimental artist book Sligh created in the mid 1990s documenting the female-to-male transition of a man named Jake as an early photographic archive of Black Feminist theory of identity in relation to transgender rights and experiences. Through manipulating dominant photographic practices, Sligh demonstrates a Black feminist ethics of documentary work that resists appropriating the stories of others while creating space for the impacts of witnessing someone else’s experience.