Rex Cassidy

Rex Cassidy (they/them) is a queer and transgender scholar, professor, and working artist living in Chicago, Illinois. They hold a Master of Arts in Art Education from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where they began shaping an interdisciplinary practice that bridges academic research, teaching, and studio work. Their research focuses on how artists respond to ancient and contemporary visual cultures, especially how they recover or remake these traditions in direct dialogue with documentation of their own bodies. Rex has also worked on the historical traditions of the workshop and the complex relationship of attribution and recognition between artist and fabricator. Their broader commitment lies in advancing conversations about how identity, history, and materiality converge in both scholarship and art. Rex moves fluidly between creation and research, and they model a practice in which theory and making are mutually generative. They have been published in the journal Art Education, and their work has been shown at the ARC Gallery, Evanston Art Center, the Koelhnine Museum of Art, Peninsula School of Art, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Rex has taught art and art history at the college level across the Midwestern United States.