Donna Grund Slepack

Raised in multiethnic, working-class Cleveland in the 1950s, fortified by the infinite textures and flavors of Jell-O, and witness to the Cuyahoga River on fire, Donna Grund Slepack claims that she always knew that she would head west and be “from Ohio.” After completing her primary and secondary Lutheran education, Donna left parochial things behind and headed to the University of Colorado to earn a degree in Fine Arts. Although she was mesmerized by the Rocky Mountains and the blue sky, she spent a limited time in Boulder. Instead Donna studied abroad during her senior year at the University of Bonn where she became fluent in German. Euro-rail pass in hand, she managed to visit many of Europe’s treasures of the 1960s, forever igniting her love of living in other cultures. Upon her return to the U.S. she briefly taught art in inner-city Cleveland and then German in rural, small town Ohio.

The first wave of the feminist movement of the early 1970s coincided with Donna’s entrance into graduate school at the University of Cincinnati. Combining her interests in feminism, education, and politics with her German skills, she launched a comparative study of sex-role stereotyping in children’s textbooks used in the DDR (East Germany) with the textbooks used in the United States. The field study and research required spending time in East Germany where she collected the textbooks and met with the writers, publishers, and educators. She then empirically contrasted the sex-role stereotypes between the socialist and capitalist texts. In 1976 she successfully defended her thesis and earned her doctoral degree. 

By this time Donna was at the other end of the Oregon Trail. For many years she managed college degree completion programs locally and coordinated a master’s program in psychology. Meanwhile her interest in activism began to blossom. Thus she participated in the first sit-in at the Trojan Nuclear Power Plant in 1977, was arrested, was selected to testify, and was acquitted along with all of her fellow protestors on the basis of a choice of evils defense. This experience led to her decision to combine her art with her political expression.

Donna’s first venture into public art was The Yellow Ribbon Project (1981) mounted in the Portland’s South Park Blocks to call attention to human rights violations within the U.S. In 1984 she collaborated with other local artists to initiate the Portland Shadow Project that memorialized the victims of the Hiroshima bombing by stenciling chalk shadows of their remains on the sidewalks in the middle of the night. The following year Donna helped organize the International Shadow Project to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the bombing. More than fifteen thousand participants in twenty-six countries around the world painted shadows according to the handbook that Donna published. Other political art projects would follow including a Mother’s Day event that she choreographed in 1986 on behalf of the Women’s International League for Peace & Freedom in solidarity with the Mothers of the Disappeared in Latin America. 

In 1986 Donna learned of a young indigenous Mixtec agricultural worker from Oaxaca apparently wrongfully convicted of murder in Clackamas County. Initially she agreed to support the young man by teaching him English, but soon became convinced of his innocence and committed herself to reversing this injustice. Over the next four and a half years she labored endlessly on his behalf, assembling the Santiago Freedom Committee that included several jurors, members of the legal community, the press, academicians, and a broad cross-section of concerned citizens including the migrant labor community. The campaign garnered an enormous amount of local and national attention, ultimately achieving success with Ventura’s release from prison in 1991.

In recent years Donna has turned her attention to the campaign to abolish the death penalty in Oregon. She has acquired training as a mitigation specialist to advocate on behalf of death row inmates in the legal process of appealing their sentences. She also works as a volunteer to provide a support system for them.

Quoting from George Bernard Shaw, Robert Kennedy often said, “There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why….I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?” Surely these words will always be Donna’s credo. Working for social change with extraordinary compassion will be her legacy.