Cassandra Press: An Unfolding, Sanford Biggers and the Amistad Research Center is an exhibition and publication that takes the form of spatial reading—north, south, east, west. As an exhibition and bound reader, the work cuts across the gallery, the binding, an artist’s practice, and a historical archive.
Artist Kandis Williams founded Cassandra Press in 2016. Over the past five years, Cassandra has published thirty-one spiral-bound readers, dense volumes of history, sociology, and theory organized thematically. Cassandra Press: An Unfolding, Sanford Biggers and the Amistad Research Center are presented in coordination with the concurrent exhibition, Sanford Biggers: Codeswitch, and presents a collection of Cassandra’s historic readers as well as a new reader that incorporates and reorganizes research from the collection of the Amistad Research Center as context and response to Biggers’s Codex series of quilts. Biggers’s objects participate in a contested history of quilts used as signposts—maps to liberation along the Underground Railroad. From these quilts, Cassandra Press extrapolates and visualizes intertwined histories of migration and mythology, oppression and assimilation, creative expression, and its appropriation.
