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Transforming Hate: An Artist’s Book

black spread with image of folded paper crane — Transforming Hate (book spread, 2016) Clarissa Sligh

spread with Buddha and text — Transforming Hate (book spread, 2016) Clarissa Sligh

Transforming Hate by Clarissa Sligh. — Transforming Hate (page, 2016) Clarissa Sligh

Transforming Hate by Clarissa Sligh, back cover with a red image on a yellow background. — Transforming Hate by Clarissa Sligh.

The proposal, red background with white text — Transforming Hate (page, 2016) Clarissa Sligh

Edition: 1000

Year: 2016

Binding: Perfect bound softcover

Dimensions: 8 x 8 inches

Pages: 108

Materials:

Four-color offset lithography
Illustrated paper wrappers with flaps
Housed in foldout die-cut box with gold foil origami crane inserted into cover slot

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?