Artist Research: Clarissa Sligh

Clarissa Sligh teaches in the Graduate Photography Department at the School of Visual Arts in New York. Her artwork is based on family experiences and community stories. Through archival images and old photographs Sligh confronts issues of racism and sexism in a historically American context. In 1989 Sligh created one socially conscious piece as a site specific installation for a show at the Air Gallery in New York. This retrospective was titled “Mississippi in America: We Knew They Might be Killed”, and served as a commemorative for the murders of Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman. The exhibit marked the 25th anniversary of their deaths. The three boys were civil rights workers, all in their early twenties, who were working to register black voters in Meridian, Mississippi. When the Klu Klux Klan discovered this they made a premeditated plan to kill them all. All three boys were together one day in the June of 1964 when they were stopped and brought into the county courthouse on an alleged traffic violation. They were released later that day but on the way back to Meridian were stopped again on a remote road in the countryside. One by one the boys were executed and their bodies hidden. The investigation into this crime ended up being a catalyst for Civil Rights activists all over the country and drew national attention to the state of Mississippi. “It was an old-fashioned lynching, carried out with the help of county officials, a form of activity that had been going on since 1865, but the Federal Government had refused to intervene. Now "the nation" was shocked. Many historians say the government was finally mobilized to investigate the case primarily because two of the victims, Goodman and Schwerner were white.” Clarissa Sligh’s installation honors the memory of these three people who died fighting for the Civil Rights of others. There are many contemporary artists who are using the idea of the “memorial” in their work today. It serves as a vessel for expressing different emotions and political ideas. My work on the slave trade in Richmond helps me to communicate with people in my community about my frustration for the lack of awareness and disregard for African American history here. In the beginning stages of my research I encountered many people who didn’t know that Richmond played an enormous role in the slave trade. So much has been left unpreserved that it’s hard to tell where to place the blame when civil war hospitals have been turned into nightclubs and burial grounds lie underneath the interstate. An auction house still stands in the middle of downtown and there is no information about humans being sold from inside this place, not a single marker. I remember watching the movie Mississippi Burning with my parents when I was little. They didn’t shelter me from history at all so it was common for me to watch movies like this with my parents. I particularly remember watching one movie with my mother about the Lakota Indian massacre. When I cried my mother comforted me by saying “it’s okay to cry for all those people because if we don’t remember them then it’s like they lived for nothing”. I guess that memorials are just a way to reaffirm that belief, that people actually live for a reason.