Cassandra Press

Founded in 2016, Cassandra Press is an extension of the multidisciplinary practice of Kandis Williams. What began as a publishing platform to highlight texts on issues of race, feminism, power, and aesthetics, Cassandra Press has since grown to become a multifaceted educational resource, hosting virtual workshops and organizing artist residencies alongside its publishing program. Over the past five years, Cassandra Press has published thirty-one readers which function as spiral-bound anthologies presenting theory, history, sociology, and criticism by a panoply of intellectuals, activists, and editorial sources. In 2020 the platform began the Cassandra Classrooms project, a series of immersive courses led by artists, intellectuals, and educators who share their vital knowledge and invite participants into generative investigations. Classroom sessions thus far have featured Manuel Arturo Abreu, Rhea Dillon and Yaniya Lee, among many others.

Kandis Williams is a visual artist whose practice spans collage, performance, writing, publishing, and curating. She explores and deconstructs critical theory around race, nationalism, authority, and eroticism. Her work examines the body as a site of experience while drawing upon her background in dramaturgy to envision spaces that accommodate the varied biopolitical economies, which inform how form and movement might be read. Williams establishes indices that network parts of the anatomy, regions of Black diaspora, as well as communication and obfuscation, relaying how popular culture and myth are interconnected. The artist is also the founder and editor-at-large of Cassandra Press, an artist-run publishing and educational platform producing lo-fi printed matter, classrooms, projects, artist books, and exhibitions. The platform’s intention is to disseminate ideas, distribute new language, propagate dialogue- centering ethics, aesthetics, femme driven activism, and black scholarship.