BA, Sarah Lawrence College. MFA, School of the Art Institute of Chicago. slavick is an Irvine, California based interdisciplinary conceptual artist. A professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for 27 years, she taught courses in conceptual photography, body imaging, collaborative practices, drawing, collage, and graduate seminars. She has held artist residencies in Canada, France, Japan, and most recently at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and the University of California, Irvine. She has exhibited her work internationally, and her work is included in many collections, including the Queens Museum, the National Library of France, the Library of Congress, the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, and the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work explores issues of labor, feminism, war, radiation, atomic power and nuclear weapons, survival, archives, and exposures. slavick is the author of two monographs—Bomb After Bomb: A Violent Cartography, with a foreword by Howard Zinn, and After Hiroshima 広島のあと, with an essay by James Elkins; Cameramouth—a collection of surrealist poetry; and Holding History In Our Hand, commissioned for the 75th commemoration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. She is the founder of SWANS: Slow War Against the Nuclear State, a collective of eight women artists addressing nuclear issues. She is the co-founder of the Collaborative Collage Collective. Her work has been featured in the New York, Tokyo, and Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Asia-Pacific Journal, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Cultural Politics, Afterimage, and Foam Magazine, among other publications. Her poems have been featured in the Brooklyn Rail, Voice and Verse Poetry Magazine (Hong Kong), Blue Lake Review, Knowing Bodies, Meat for Tea, and Love in the Time of Covid (New Zealand). SLC, 2026–
Previous Courses
Visual and Studio Arts
Conceptual Photography
Open, Seminar—Fall
ARTS 3153
Definition of photography: The art or process of producing images by the action of radiant energy, and especially light, on a sensitive surface (such as film or an optical sensor). First known use: 1839. Etymology: The word “photography” was created from the Greek roots φωτός (phōtos), genitive of φῶς (phōs), “light” and γραφή (graphé), “representation by means of lines” or “drawing, together” meaning “drawing with light.”
This course is designed for students who wish to pursue their own projects through a close analysis and exploration of analog photographic and digital processes, formally and conceptually. The course is designed to help students think “photographically” and to make art through a conceptually photographic model or framework. While we are in the midst of/already passed a technological shift in photography—from “wet” processes that use negatives and tangible film to virtual and electronic processes, we will primarily be reading texts about and looking at artists who work with “old school” photography. The use of all technically possible and theoretically appropriate media is encouraged. We will have technical demonstrations, group and individual critiques, PowerPoint, video, and film presentations of, as well as reading discussions about, historical and contemporary photography and art that deal with issues surrounding “documentary” and “art” photography; representation; narrative; the personal as political; the technical and conceptual history of photography; indexicality and the heterotopic; and memory and fiction. Students are encouraged to utilize whatever media is conceptually appropriate for their ideas. Students can use iPhones, film and digital cameras, scanners, Xerox machines, Adobe Photoshop, found photographs, archives, text, and anything that is conceptually photographic.
Faculty
Experimental Photography
Open, Seminar—Fall
ARTS 3128
This course will be an introduction to visual/photographic culture, studio art practices and theories, and photography in general through formal and conceptual experimentation. This course is designed to introduce students to: basic black and white darkroom practices—while encouraging play, chance and accidental miracles in the darkroom through solarization, chemical interactions, and image manipulation; alternative processes (like cyanotypes); pushing the formal limits of digital image production; and a critical understanding of historical and contemporary photographic theory and production. The course is designed to help students expand their notions of photography through trial and error. There is no such thing as failure—only research (or experimentation). The use of all technically possible media will be encouraged. We will have several group critiques and PowerPoint/video/film presentations of, and reading discussions about, historical and contemporary photography and art that engages with experimentation and pushing the boundaries of what constitutes “photography.”