Clarissa Sligh
Women Bring the People is an homage to jazz singer and songwriter Abby Lincoln and critical theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Abby Lincoln shifted jazz lyrics as she focused on writing songs about the reality of women’s lives. Her emphasis on woman’s importance, that, “they – the women bring the people” profoundly influenced later jazz vocalists and composers
Spivak introduced deconstructive critical strategies into feminism. How can world economies be formulated when the value‑producing work of woman, who is in the possession of a place of production in the womb, is overlooked.
Clarifying language and consciousness helps us take a stand.
Clarissa Sligh works with text, photography, artist's books, and installations. At an early age, in 1955, when she was just 15, Sligh's personal life intersected with national history when she became the lead plaintiff in a school desegregation case in Virginia. From that moment forward, her explorations of race, identity, history, and memory – first in math/science working for NASA, later in business, and finally, in the arts – has taken into account difference, transformation, and complication.
She received fellowships and awards from the John and Robyn Horn Foundation, the Puffin Foundation, Anonymous was a Woman, the ICP Infinity Award, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts.
Sligh’s work has been exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Rosenbach Museum and Library, and is in collections including the Museum of Modern Art New York, and the National Gallery of Art Washington, DC.
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