Cassie Packard

New York

Art Writer at Freelance

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Articles

Summer Reads: Books the Frieze Team Can’t Put Down

2 weeks ago | frieze.com | Cassie Packard |Lou Selfridge |Andrew Durbin |Vanessa Peterson |Sean Burns |Ivana Cholakova | +1 more

Frieze PublishingYes, email me reviews, offers, and opinions by artists, writers, and editors from Frieze Frieze EventsYes, email me Frieze Events Inc and Frieze Events Ltd’s global programme information including special offers and benefits The War of Art (2025) | Lauren O’Neill-Butler A book with backbone, Lauren O’Neill-Butler’s The War of Art (2025) draws on oral histories and archival research to elucidate the ways in which artists in the US have protested, agitated and organized since...
Lauren O’Neill-Butler’s Chronicle of US Artist Protest

2 weeks ago | frieze.com | Lauren O’Neill-Butler |Cassie Packard

Frieze PublishingYes, email me reviews, offers, and opinions by artists, writers, and editors from Frieze Frieze EventsYes, email me Frieze Events Inc and Frieze Events Ltd’s global programme information including special offers and benefits Sun Tzu’s The Art of War (c.475–221 BCE) is famously a 13-part guide to military strategy.
Trump’s Dismantling of DEI Puts Culture Workers on the Frontlines

Mar 12, 2025 | frieze.com | Cassie Packard |TK Smith |Chloe Stead |Rebecca Pauline Jampol |Daisy Nam |Alyssa Nitchun

On 20 January, the White House issued an executive order that demanded the termination of all Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programmes. Following this order, there have been instances of US museums cancelling exhibitions, closing diversity offices and deleting DEI ‘buzzwords’ from their websites. On 27 March, another executive order directly targeted the Smithsonian Institution.
Editor’s Picks: Chappell Roan’s Sapphic Country Single

Mar 7, 2025 | frieze.com | Cassie Packard

Frieze Editor’s Picks is a fortnightly column in which a frieze editor shares their recommendations for what to watch, read and listen to. Chappell Roan’s ‘The Giver’ CampaignIt took months after Chappell Roan performed her new lesbian country single ‘The Giver’ on Saturday Night Live – crooning in a gingham ensemble that she ‘get[s] the job done’ – until the official release date (13 March) was announced. In between, she launched a campy promotional campaign to tide her fans over.
Carl Cheng Makes Art for the Anthropocene

Feb 24, 2025 | frieze.com | Cassie Packard

On the last March weekend of 1988, visitors to Santa Monica State Beach witnessed something peculiar: a 14-tonne concrete roller, Carl Cheng’s Santa Monica Art Tool (1988), embossing the sand with an aerial view of a Los Angeles-inspired metropolis. Titled Walk on L.A., the topography teemed with cars, motorways, buildings and handprints (a tongue-in-cheek gesture, since Cheng’s artmaking ‘tools’, which yoke his industrial-design acumen to conceptual projects, minimize evidence of his hand).
The Artists Embracing Queer Ecology

Feb 14, 2025 | frieze.com | Cassie Packard

Lizards traverse a warm, sun-soaked torso: body-made-rock. A figure presses her flesh against a tree’s ridged bark; another sprawls in a meadow, tall fingers of grass clinging to her bush. At one point, leaf litter fills the frame, the bare feet that tread upon it flitting in and out of shot. Made just a few years after experimental filmmaker Barbara Hammer came out as gay, Dyketactics (1974) is a four-minute short in which nude women frolic and touch one another outdoors in Napa Valley.
The Top Ten Shows Around the World in 2024

Dec 10, 2024 | frieze.com | Ivana Cholakova |Cassie Packard |Lou Selfridge

In a year when AI has become an increasingly present part of our day-to-day lives, it’s no surprise that artists have been making use of technology to think about human experience: at Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai, Rindon Johnson’s avatar swims across a body of water which changes in response to live weather data, whilst Ian Cheng’s exhibition at Gladstone Gallery in Seoul saw the artist present two unnerving AI-driven videos.
‘Precarious Joys’ Speaks in Declaratives

Oct 14, 2024 | frieze.com | Cassie Packard

In the mid-1960s, Chilean-born artist Cecilia Vicuña began combining salvaged materials into delicate bricolages she called ‘Precarios’, some of which she ceded to the tides. ‘The history of art written in the North includes nothing of the South,’ she mused in her 1983 book Precario/Precarious.
Editor’s Picks: Merve Emre’s Podcast Demystifies the Art of Criticism

Aug 9, 2024 | frieze.com | Cassie Packard

Frieze Editor’s Picks is a fortnightly column in which a frieze editor shares their recommendations for what to watch, read and listen to. Merve Emre, The Critic and Her PublicsCriticism often manifests as a polished object, tumbled smooth by writing and editing. It’s a rare pleasure, then, to trace the live pinballing of thought as a gifted critic works in real time.
Sable Elyse Smith’s Opera Inhabits the Storm

Jul 19, 2024 | frieze.com | Cassie Packard

Settling into the black-box performance space at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), my skin still slick with New York City’s humidity, I opened the libretto-zine accompanying artist Sable Elyse Smith’s first opera, If you unfolded us (2024). I had visited the space a week prior to soak up Smith’s Weather Report (2024), a sensual video that features a song by the same title from the opera and pays homage to the music video as a vernacular form. Now, the installation housing the video was a set.