Casey Carsel.

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About the artist

Casey Carsel (www.caseycarsel.com) is a maker and writer who seeks to untangle the ways in which cultural narratives embed themselves in diaspora. How do the stories conveyed by traditions, artefacts, and landscape shape identities and create communities? What is most cherished and how is it held? Through socially inflected objects, histories, and modes of communication like garlic, the Holocaust, and jokes, their texts and textiles seek to open a space where, as for the generations that came before and for those who will follow, stories become homes.

Casey has been the recipient of numerous grants, residencies, and fellowships, including a Fulbright Creative Writing Research Grant, a New York Public Library Short-Term Fellowship, a Ragdale Visual Artist Residency, and a Tides Institute & Museum of Art Residency. They have presented solo exhibitions at galleries including Comfort Station, Chicago (upcoming); Co-Prosperity, Chicago; RM Gallery, Auckland; and Blue Oyster, Dunedin. Their writing has been published by Documentarian, Tipton Poetry Review, Hamster, West Space, and Ocula Magazine, amongst others.

Artistic research fellowship

Casey is the recipient of a 2023–24 Short-Term Residential Artistic Research Fellow at the Folger Shakespeare Library for their series of textile works "The ink, the needle, the knife". This series investigates the historical, technical, and material contexts of the representation of Jews in Shakespeare’s England—an era that coincides with their centuries-long expulsion from the country. At the Folger in 2024, they will pay close attention to the materiality of the historical documents studied, and craft original artworks in response to their formal aspects as well as the information they provide.

While interrogating the tragedy and comedy that floods the spaces between the representations and experiences of this cultural minority, Casey also plans to investigate the craft cultures of the English Renaissance. They will merge these discoveries with contemporary techniques and contexts in the final works, which will be presented in group and solo exhibitions in the United States, New Zealand, and Europe.

At the Folger, they will conduct a textual, visual, and textural examination of the too-familiar image of the Jew Shylock and his contemporaries as figures at the intersection between art and the social, between the imagined and the real. In this contemporary moment, where the portrayal of minorities across a range of media is being offered due reconsideration, they look to provoke new discoveries by re-examining these depictions while offering a new material context to the examination.