Cortney Cassidy

Cortney Cassidy is an artist and horticulturist using text, image, and time to study life as art in a natural world.

botanical sign along wooded footpath reads nature had other ideas

Reading the Landscape is a site-responsive installation of interpretive botanical signs placed along a wooded footpath.

Exhibited in A Place in the Park II, curated by Mac Benson and Caroline Perkison, 2026

Black and white photograph of light shining through forest canopy onto a pond latter

“Every act of feeding, digging, and pruning will reveal a new truth.”

from Strange Gardens Dark Properties, 2025

Printed spread from book printed with purple ink

“When possible, it is a good idea to read about something surrounded by that something.”

from Do Plants Feel? Issue Press, 2025

Upclose photo of a rose in black and white distorted by a homemade pinhole camera lens

“I knew that something was wrong with the way I used my body.”

from Growing Beyond the Computer Are.na x Dark Properties, 2024

“A maker of images who abandons true nature for false beauty is unable to make anyone see.”

from Authentic Type Specimens AUTHENTIC, 2024

“There doesn’t seem to be any way to represent smell other than to describe what kind of attention it attracts.”

from Cherry Chapstick Are.na, 2024

manifesto text letterpress printed with black ink on dark paper

A Soft Manifesto printed in a limited edition of 50 with metal type and a Vandercook printing press.

Buy a $30 print to support Mail Blog.

Originally published by The Creative Independent, 2020

“I can’t think of a more comfortable, self-reliant life for myself than that of a woman who holds onto her autonomy.”

from Notable Spinsters included in Korte Metten at Kieken Centrale, Antwerp, Belgium 2024 and an earlier version was published as I Just Need Space in The Smudge, July 2019

“The useless is useful even after it’s gone.”

from All the flowers in May Sarton’s Journal of a Solitude Third edition in the Everything I know about...so far series published by The Institute for the Study of the Urtext’s Urditions imprint, 2024

“Pretending I am normal while my internal reality slowly bleeds through to the external reality of a very long work meeting.”

from The Circus Tent is a Good Metaphor for the Whole Show Going on Inside Mixed-media essay published in the anthology, Our Red Book, Simon & Schuster, 2022

Anonymous person wrapped in striped circus tent fabric

“It seems possible that [feelings] are essential tools in both the construction of our world and our understanding of it.”

from Poetry’s So Common Hardly Anyone Can Find It Are.na Annual 2022, and the final graduating thesis for the completion of my DIY MFA

“This system defines who gets to be an artist and when.”

from Can I Be An Artist Here American Institute of Graphic Arts, 2021

flower printed over text that reads she loved flowers

I study life as art in a natural world through sustained observation, research, and publishing. My work has been published with small presses and presented at international art fairs, with selected works held by the New York Public Library, Museu d‘Art Contemporani de Barcelona, and Grand Valley State University. My independent research is supported by the Vartan Gregorian Center for Research in the Humanities.

I am available for select research, writing, and interpretive projects for cultural, educational, and environmental organizations. My background in visual and systems design informs an approach to complex material grounded in sustained inquiry, critical analysis, and clear structure. Contact: cortneyvcassidy@gmail.com.

To sign up for Mail Blog send correspondence to PO BOX 320032, Brooklyn, NY 11232 or mailblog@mailbox.org — Mail Blog is sent around the world and is always free. Trades or donations are not required but happily accepted.

Reading Log

Nourishment