Cassie Packard is a freelance writer and reviews editor at frieze magazine who is particularly interested in worldbuilding practices and networks, with queerness as a frame and focus.
For the first time in the prize’s history, the Rabkin Foundation commissioned portraits of the winners in the spaces where they write and conducted interviews with them about their lives and ideas. Here is Mary Louise Schumacher, a longtime journalist and the foundation’s new executive director, in conversation with Cassie. It has been gently edited for length and clarity.
Mentioned in this episode:
James Joyce
John Ashbery
Frank O’Hara
Jacques Dupin
Adrienne Rich
Emily Dickinson
“Sable Elyse Smith’s Opera Inhabits the Storm,” by Cassie Packard (frieze, July 2024)
Toni Morrison
Renee Gladman
Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe (Macmillan, 2023)
“Knotted Lives” by Cassie Packard (The Brooklyn Rail, February 2024)
Drama 1882 by Wael Shawky at the 2024 Venice Biennale
“The Digital Media Experiments of Auriea Harvey” by Cassie Packard (frieze, February 2024)
Gamer Theory by McKenzie Wark (Harvard University Press, 2007)
Art Rules: How Great Artists Think, Create and Work by Cassie Packard (Frances Lincoln, 2023)
“Whose Interests Does AI Serve?” by Cassie Packard (ArtReview, December 2023)
“A Common Thread by Rowan Renee” by Cassie Packard (Recess Art, January 2022)
The Tarot Garden
“AB-EX and Disco Balls: In Defense of Abstract Expressionism II” by Amy Sillman (Artforum, Summer 2011)
“In Defense of Abstract Expressionism” by T.J. Clark (October, Summer 1994)
Hyperallergic
Cassie Packard at Hyperallergic
Momus
Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles
Jupiter Magazine
Jessica Lynne
Jarrett Earnest
This episode of the Rabkin Interviews was produced by the Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation, an artist-endowed foundation based in Portland, Maine. The Rabkin Prize is awarded through a nomination process, and an independent jury selects the winners. The production team for the Rabkin Interviews includes Cindy Eggert Johnson, producer, and Johnathon Olsen, editor. Music is by Ariel Shalom, Flint, Steven Beddall, Nomad Producer, and Just for Kicks. These interviews are accompanied by newly commissioned portraits of these writers made by Kevin J. Miyazaki in the spaces where they work.
Cassie Packard, 2024 Rabkin Prize winner