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.

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.

Lyons, Joan. Artists’ Books: Visual Studies Workshop Press 1971-2008, Visual Studies Workshop Press, 2009, Rochester, NY, p. 102.

Wasserman, Krystyna. The Book as Art: Artists’ Books from the National Museum of Women in the Arts, National Museum of Women in the Arts, 2007, Washington, DC, p. 106.