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Four Elements

Clarissa Thompson Sligh

by Synatra Smith, Ph.D. on 2022-01-13T12:00:00-05:00 in Black Artists | 0 Comments

African American artist, lecturer, and essayist Clarissa Thompson Sligh was born in 1939 in Washington, DC. Her work explores the themes of social injustice, memory/history, transformation and change, identity, and environment through the use of photography, text, and other media. Initially interested in mathematics and science, Sligh earned a BS in mathematics from Hampton Institute (now Hampton University) in Hampton, Virginia, in 1961 and subsequently worked for NASA. She went on to earn a BFA in visual arts from Howard University in 1972 and an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in 1973. In 1988 she co-founded the “Coast to Coast National Women Artists of Color Projects,” which was organized as an exhibition that Sligh co-curated with Margaret Gallegos at the request of African American artist Faith Ringgold. Two hundred women of color representing over thirty states participated in the first exhibition. The project subsequently toured to at least ten institutions across the country. Sligh went on to earn an MFA in visual arts from Howard University in 1999. 

At age fifteen, Sligh was the lead plaintiff in a school desegregation case in Virginia.[1] She is also the keeper of her family’s history through photographs and archival materials and uses it to signify a larger national narrative related to the Black experience of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She explains, “As a young Black child, I was told how bad things are out there in the world for us. . . . I tried to use images that had a certain grounding, a certain power. . . . It was wonderful to discover afterward that a lot of people . . . related to the images and had to tell me their stories.”[2] Sligh lives and works in Asheville, North Carolina. 

 

PMA Collection

 

Notes

[1] Thompson v. County School Bd. of Arlington County, Va., 204 F. Supp. 620 (E.D. Va. 1962).

[2] Willis 2000, 181. 

 

References

Center for Book Arts. n.d. “Clarissa Sligh.” Accessed October 29, 2021. https://centerforbookarts.org/people/clarissa-sligh

Sligh, Clarissa. n.d. Artist’s website. Accessed October 29, 2021. https://clarissasligh.com

Willis, Deborah. 2000. “Photography in the 1980s and 1990s.” In Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers, 1840 to the Present. New York: W. W. Norton. 

 

Further Reading


Sligh, Clarissa T. 2006. “The Plaintiff Speaks.” In The Education of a Photographer. Edited by Charles H. Traub, Steven Heller, and Adam B. Bell. New York: Allworth Press.


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