Realist-feminist painter Sylvia Sleigh emigrated to America in 1961. She was born in Llandudno, Wales in 1916, studying in Sussex, England at the Brighton School of Art. In the 1940s, at art school, she received the harsh advice, "You have no talent. You're just here to waste time until you get married." She ultimately received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1982, and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation in 1985.

Sleigh also was awarded the Edith Kreeger Wolf Distinguished Professorship at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, where she taught. Sleigh has also taught at the New School for Social Research, in New York City, and the State University of New York at Stony Brook. She was married to art critic and Guggenheim Museum (New York) curator Lawrence Alloway.

Sylvia Sleigh has had one-person exhibitions at Northwestern University; Bennington College, Vermont; Ohio State University, Columbus; University of Rhode Island, Kingston; Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey; Fordham University, Bronx, New York; G.W. Einstein Company, New York City; New School for School Research; and a show in 1990 that traveled to Ball State University, Muncie, Indiana; Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin; and Butler Institute of Art, Youngstown, Ohio.

Her painting, "A.I.R. Group Portrait," 1978, 75 x 82, documents the twenty-one women members of the Artist-in-Residence Gallery in New York City, one of the early feminist cooperative galleries in America. Sleigh's "The Turkish Bath," 1973, a take-off on Titian and Ingres subject matter, depicting four nude art critics, is in the collection of the Smart Museum, University of Chicago.

Writings about Sylvia Sleigh include Donald B. Kuspit's essay in Sylvia Sleigh: Recent Paintings, a catalog put out by G.W. Einstein for her 1980 show; Charlotte S. Rubenstein's American Women Artists, published in 1982 by G.K. Hall; a review by Gerrit Henry, "Sylvia Sleigh at G.W. Einstein," in the Summer 1983 issue of Art in America; and Joanna Frueh's "Chicago: Sylvia Sleigh at Zaks," in the January 1986 Art in America.

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