INSTALLATIONS
Mississippi is America
Witness to Dissent
Sandy Ground
Re(Union)
Passages
ARTIST'S BOOKS
Reading Dick & Jane with Me
What's Happening with Momma?
Hiroshima, Hopes & Dreams
Voyage(r)
Wrongly Bodied Two
SERIES
The Masculinity Project
Reframing the Past
Reading Dick & Jane
Suburban Atlanta
Jake in Transition
PRINTS, ETC.
Images
Reading Dick & Jane with Me (1989), is an artist’s book created to interrupt the authority of old elementary school textbooks called " The Dick and Jane Readers." These reading textbooks of the 1940’s and 50’s represented a white upper middle class suburban family as normal life for most Americans. Although statistically the average American at this time was working class, the artist as a young girl thought these depictions meant that her family must be an aberration outside the norm. In Reading Dick and Jane with Me, children from Clarissa’s old neighborhood stand in for the young people who could never talk back at that time.
LINKS
ARTICLE:
Williams, Carla. "Reading Deeper: The Legacy of Dick and Jane in the work of Clarissa Sligh." Image, Vol 38, #3/4, 1995. A publication of the George Eastman House, Rochester, NY. Essay appears online:
www.carlagirl.net
BOOK INCLUDED IN:
Collins, Lisa Gail. The Art of History: African American Women Artists Engage the Past, Rutgers University Press, 2002, New Brunswick, NJ, pp. 112 - 118.