Location: Vallejo, CA
Medium: Activism, social systems, performance, installation
Website: feministeconomicsdepartment.com
Cassie Thornton received her BFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her MFA from the California College of the Arts. She works under the banner of the Feminist Economics Department (the FED) — a name that is simultaneously a title, an alter ego, and a one-person-plus-occasional-accomplices institution. She has been based in Vallejo, California, and has collaborated extensively with Strike Debt and other activist networks in the Bay Area.
Her 2020 book The Hologram: Feminist, Peer-to-Peer Health for a Post-Pandemic Future (Pluto Press) documents one of her most sustained and widely replicated projects, a viral peer health model developed in dialogue with the Social Solidarity Clinics of Greece. She describes herself as an artist reluctantly — preferring roles like "problem solver, wizard, professional emoter" — but uses the designation strategically to move projects outside bureaucracy and skepticism, into spaces where people can be surprised and open.
Thornton uses social practices — institutional critique, insurgent architecture, hypnosis, yoga, debt organizing, and peer health — to find the soft spots in the hard surfaces of capitalist life. Her work investigates how economic and governmental systems shape public affect, behavior, and the unconscious, with a long-running focus on debt, security, and the bodily experience of financial precarity. She has invented a grassroots alternative credit reporting service for survivors of gentrification, hypnotized hedge fund managers, finger-painted with the grime found inside bank branches, donated cursed paintings to profiteering bankers, and taught feminist economics to yogis.
Her projects often generate replicable systems rather than discrete objects — tools, protocols, and social technologies designed to spread peer-to-peer without institutional infrastructure. The Hologram, her best-known project, is a four-person health monitoring system in which three non-experts create a three-dimensional picture of a fourth person's physical, psychological, and social health, inspired by the experimental care models of Greece's financial crisis.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
Claim this page → to update your own profile.