Transforming Hate: An Artist's Book by Clarissa Sligh
This piece was featured in the August 2023 issue of The Fore Edge, a quarterly newsletter from MCBA that highlights new artist’s books and zines for collections, universities, and libraries. If you are interested in receiving this newsletter, there is a sign up available here. Past featured pieces can be viewed here.
Do we have the courage to live differently? This is one of the many questions Clarissa Sligh asks herself and the reader while exploring the depths of oppression within race, gender, class, and sexual orientation. Perfect bound, softcover book with four-color offset lithography and illustrated paper wrappers with flaps. This beautiful book rests in a foldout die-cut box with gold foil origami crane inserted into cover slot. 108 pages.
Excerpt from the foreword:
I am a black woman. I am an artist. For many years I have been creating work to bring issues of social justice into the public discourse. This book evolved from a project for which I folded origami cranes from pages of white supremacist books for the exhibition, Speaking Volumes: Transforming Hate. It was organized by the Montana Human Rights Network and the Holter Art Museum in Helena, Montana and opened in 2008.
In Transforming Hate: An Artist’s Book, I was trying to look at what it was like for me to turn the hateful words of the white supremacist books into a beautiful art object. That exploration helped me understand more fully the many levels of oppression and violence at the intersections of race, gender, class, and sexual orientation. Why do we keep each other from being who we really are? How can we begin to talk about what separates us?
In our roles, as voyeur and as participant, we make daily decisions about who gets to have rights and who is marginalized in our society. I ask us to question our perceptions about history, reality, identity and voice. Do we have the courage to live differently?
8” x 8”
*Consignment item. Not eligible for 10% membership discount. All consignment purchases are final and non-refundable once shipped.
This piece was featured in the August 2023 issue of The Fore Edge, a quarterly newsletter from MCBA that highlights new artist’s books and zines for collections, universities, and libraries. If you are interested in receiving this newsletter, there is a sign up available here. Past featured pieces can be viewed here.
Do we have the courage to live differently? This is one of the many questions Clarissa Sligh asks herself and the reader while exploring the depths of oppression within race, gender, class, and sexual orientation. Perfect bound, softcover book with four-color offset lithography and illustrated paper wrappers with flaps. This beautiful book rests in a foldout die-cut box with gold foil origami crane inserted into cover slot. 108 pages.
Excerpt from the foreword:
I am a black woman. I am an artist. For many years I have been creating work to bring issues of social justice into the public discourse. This book evolved from a project for which I folded origami cranes from pages of white supremacist books for the exhibition, Speaking Volumes: Transforming Hate. It was organized by the Montana Human Rights Network and the Holter Art Museum in Helena, Montana and opened in 2008.
In Transforming Hate: An Artist’s Book, I was trying to look at what it was like for me to turn the hateful words of the white supremacist books into a beautiful art object. That exploration helped me understand more fully the many levels of oppression and violence at the intersections of race, gender, class, and sexual orientation. Why do we keep each other from being who we really are? How can we begin to talk about what separates us?
In our roles, as voyeur and as participant, we make daily decisions about who gets to have rights and who is marginalized in our society. I ask us to question our perceptions about history, reality, identity and voice. Do we have the courage to live differently?
8” x 8”
*Consignment item. Not eligible for 10% membership discount. All consignment purchases are final and non-refundable once shipped.
This piece was featured in the August 2023 issue of The Fore Edge, a quarterly newsletter from MCBA that highlights new artist’s books and zines for collections, universities, and libraries. If you are interested in receiving this newsletter, there is a sign up available here. Past featured pieces can be viewed here.
Do we have the courage to live differently? This is one of the many questions Clarissa Sligh asks herself and the reader while exploring the depths of oppression within race, gender, class, and sexual orientation. Perfect bound, softcover book with four-color offset lithography and illustrated paper wrappers with flaps. This beautiful book rests in a foldout die-cut box with gold foil origami crane inserted into cover slot. 108 pages.
Excerpt from the foreword:
I am a black woman. I am an artist. For many years I have been creating work to bring issues of social justice into the public discourse. This book evolved from a project for which I folded origami cranes from pages of white supremacist books for the exhibition, Speaking Volumes: Transforming Hate. It was organized by the Montana Human Rights Network and the Holter Art Museum in Helena, Montana and opened in 2008.
In Transforming Hate: An Artist’s Book, I was trying to look at what it was like for me to turn the hateful words of the white supremacist books into a beautiful art object. That exploration helped me understand more fully the many levels of oppression and violence at the intersections of race, gender, class, and sexual orientation. Why do we keep each other from being who we really are? How can we begin to talk about what separates us?
In our roles, as voyeur and as participant, we make daily decisions about who gets to have rights and who is marginalized in our society. I ask us to question our perceptions about history, reality, identity and voice. Do we have the courage to live differently?
8” x 8”
*Consignment item. Not eligible for 10% membership discount. All consignment purchases are final and non-refundable once shipped.
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.
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.
