Reading Dick and Jane with Me (1989)

Cover of the book 'Reading Dick and Jane With Me' by Clarissa Sligh, featuring a simple illustration of a child and text elements related to the Dick and Jane series.

Reading Dick and Jane with Me (1989)
Clarissa Sligh
Saddle-stitched booklet, staples. H212 x W177 mm. [24] pages. Acquired from Marta Zlotnick, 6 October 2025.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

This is a painful artist’s book. In the repetitive style of the 1950s “Dick and Jane” beginning readers’ book, the child in the artist carries on a one-way conversation with children from those books. Dick, Jane, and Sally are white and upper middle class. They live in a suburban setting with their dog Spot and cat Puff, and the text of their lives is interpersed with “Fun”, “Fun”, “Fun”. They run and play, and tell the reader to “Look Look See us play”. Dick demands, “See me jump” and asks, “Who can jump Who can do what I do”. Sally insists on how pretty and white Puff is.

Alongside her redrawn versions of Dick, Jane, Sally, and their pets, the artist sketches in a cartoon self portrait and pastes in old photos of herself, siblings, and friends. For the first few pages, these images respond mutely to the “Dick and Jane” repetitions.

An artistic page featuring a simple line drawing of a person on the left and a collage of black and white photographs of children on the right, with text repeating 'Run Dick Run Jane Run Spot Run Sally Run Puff' in the background.

A line drawing of a person on the left page and a collage of repeated text 'Go Dick Go Jane Go Spot Go Sally Go Puff' alongside a historical black and white photograph of children on the right page.

Facing the page below where a white picket fence separates the artist from Dick, she and her friends respond in a scrawled script (in contrast to Dick’s typeset exhortations to “Go up up up”). They invite Dick and the reader to “come to our school” where they “go up too”.

An illustrated page from a book featuring a child by a fence looking up at an aircraft, with repetitive text reading 'Up up up' and 'Go up'. The opposite page depicts a school building with images of children's faces in the windows and handwritten text inviting readers to 'come to our school'.

In the next spread, surrounded by imperatives to “See it go” and “See it go up”, Sally frowns and appears troubled by the encroachment of scrawls over the gutter and into her typeset page. On the facing recto page, the artist and friends stutter as they read the typeset lines: “We read See. it. go. see. it. go. up.” Maybe Sally is troubled by the words between the lines:

An artistic page featuring repeated text 'See it go' in various sizes and placements, alongside a hand-drawn figure of a child and a faded black and white photograph of a group of children.

Between the lines: “We don’t talk like that but we try to read it anyhow”.

At this point, when the artist and her friends read “Run Dick Run”, the book takes a darker turn for us the readers — if we are reading with the child artist. Dick and Sally run across the double-page spread. Even though they are more roughly sketched than before and even though Dick wears a Ku Klux Klan hood, we know it is them. As the scrawled imperative RUN RUN RUN grows across the spread to its largest size, Dick’s mask slips aside. If you the reader are white, and if you understand that the scrawled (not typeset) command is in the artist’s voice, and if you are reading with the child who stands self-portrayed in the lower left hand corner and with the children in the photographs, maybe now you see what they see between the lines in Dick and Jane’s world.

A stylized illustration featuring children running, combined with black-and-white photographs of children in a playful layout. The word 'RUN' is prominently displayed multiple times, creating a dynamic visual narrative.

From here on, the child artist addresses Dick and Jane (white society) more directly. She signals her “encroachment” by taking over the verso page with all of her scrawl and places Dick, Jane, and Sally within the drawn pages of their book in the foreground of the recto page. For the first time, her self-portrait is shaded as she stands in the background of the shaded Dick and Jane book.

An illustrated page with children in vintage clothing, featuring handwritten text about playing in good clothes for Sunday school. The background contains repeated phrases 'Look' and 'See us play'.

As she explains how she and her friends differ from Dick and Jane (not likely to be listening, embedded as they are in their book), the child artist’s voice is soft but insistent in its “Dick and Jane” style repetition. For the first time, her self-portrait appears larger than the white child, and she is on the same side of the picket fence.

An illustrated open book page featuring a boy jumping on a bench with text surrounding him, including phrases about reading and parental expectations, alongside a sketch of three children in front of a fence.

In the next spread, the impact of these “Dick and Jane” stories on her and her friends is spelled out and drawn to heartbreaking effect. Sally and “Pretty white Puff” stand in sharply drawn and typeset contrast to the erasure, the slipping away, of the self-portrait and the photograph. Even the book you hold in your hands and its hand scrawled text are smearing away in the lower left corner.

An open book with illustrated text repeating 'Puff is pretty white' alongside a girl and a cat, with abstract sketches and handwritten text discussing themes of reality and perception.

The artist’s voice is soft but, like the “Dick and Jane” style, insistent. In text and image, the message is heartfelt.

A page featuring a drawn outline of a child with a photograph of five children inside the outline, alongside handwritten text that repeats the phrase about knowing how to play fun games.

A hand-drawn illustration featuring a whimsical landscape with mountains, a stylized tree, a sun, and clouds. The background includes handwritten text about dreams, emphasizing the universal nature of dreaming. The image is in black and white on a light background.

Reading Dick and Jane with Me also had an exhibition life, which Sligh describes on her website:

These cyanotype prints, 40 x 30 inches, 1990-2013, originated from artwork made for my artist’s book Reading Dick and Jane With Me while in residency at Visual Studies Workshop in 1989. The size of the original collage and the book page was about 8 ½ x 7 inches. During that residency at VSW, before the days of Photoshop, I learned to shoot the artwork onto film, strip and spot the films and make metal plates for the offset press printing of the book.

With the encouragement of Joan Lyons, the VSW Press director, I also used the large process camera to shoot and develop large negatives from the artwork. After returning home, I built a large light table, contact printed the negatives and processed them in my bathtub. The prints are sent to various exhibition sites. Viewers draw and mark on the prints in response to my image and text narratives. This process is done repeatedly until the prints are fully covered with marks and sketches left by the public.

The process continues. — Sligh website, accessed 17 July 2026.

As of this writing — in the time of Jim Crow 2.0, brutalization of children of color, and vicious beliefs in replacement theory and empathy as sin — Reading Dick and Jane With Me continues to insist — Read Dick. Read Jane. Read Sally. Read.

Books On Books

Curated by Robert Bolick

Books On Books Collection – Clarissa Sligh (III)

Reading Dick and Jane with Me (1989)

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