Virginia Thomas
12:00 pm
Clark Hall Room 206, 11130 Bellflower Road
Not many have heard the name Clarissa Sligh. Sligh was the lead plaintiff in a legal desegregation case in Virginia before she went on to work as a mathematician at NASA and later Wall Street before she quit to become an artist. Sligh found her favorite medium, the artist book, and has since used that form to challenges mainstream discourses about social justice movements and reveal the cost that rigid definitions of community-making entails. In this talk Virginia Thomas, Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and Art History at Providence College, will focus on an experimental artist book Sligh created in the mid 1990s documenting the FTM transition of a man named Jake as an early photographic archive of Black Feminist theory of identity in relation to transgender rights and experiences. Through manipulating dominant photographic practices, Sligh demonstrates a Black Feminist ethics of documentary work that resists appropriating the stories of others while creating space for the impacts of witnessing someone else's experience.
Registration is requested. Register HERE.
About the speaker:
Virginia Thomas is an Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and Art History at Providence College. Her research, teaching, and public humanities work analyzes aesthetic kinships that uproot and decompose white property-relations. Her current book project, Dark Trees: Lynching Aesthetics in Visual Grammars of Family examines the centrality of lynching aesthetics to white family visual rhetorics and considers the ways Black world-making aesthetics take up lynching’s visual schema and transform it to enact modes of reproductive justice. She is also the founder of the Queer StoRIes Project, an intergenerational oral history project for LGBTQ+ folx in Rhode Island with a focus on queer relational practices and aesthetic visions for alternative kinship models that foster intergenerational skill and story sharing. Her work has been supported by the Institute for Citizens and Scholars (formerly the Woodrow Wilson Foundation) and she has published in the feminist review with forthcoming pieces in Signs and GLQ.
Click HERE to visit Virginia Thomas' faculty page.