$HT Coin is a durational performance and NFT series released into a market where 2% of the top-grossing contemporary artists are not cisgender men. $HT Coin directly refers to Piero Manzoni's Merda D'Artista (Artist’s Shit), 1961, famous for its salacious satire of consumerism.

Extending the critique to intersect with how value is informed by subjectivity, Cassils has been eating the diets of the most financially successful contemporary (white male) artists. Does the $HT Cassils produce have the same value?

This piece is from White Male Artist’s personal collection, and is thus extremely valuable and rare.

10% of all sales will start a fund for BIPOC trans and non-binary visual artists supported by For Freedoms. To offset carbon emissions, Cassils has calculated the cost of the carbon footprint of minting 33 NFTs, and will contribute the equivalent proceeds to Solitary Gardens.

Artist Bio

CASSILS is a transgender artist who makes their own body the material and protagonist of their performances.

Cassils's art contemplates the history(s) of LGBTQI+ violence, representation, struggle and survival. For Cassils, performance is a form of social sculpture: Drawing from the idea that bodies are formed in relation to forces of power and social expectations, Cassils work investigates historical contexts to examine the present moment.

Cassils has had recent solo exhibitions at HOME Manchester, Station Museum of Contemporary Art, Perth Institute for Contemporary Arts, Ronald Feldman Fine Arts,NYC; Institute for Contemporary Art, AU; Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts; School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston; Bemis Center, Omaha; MU Eindhoven, Netherlands.

They are the recipient of a 2020 Fleck Residency from the Banff Center for the Arts, a Princeton Lewis Artist Fellowship finalist (2020), a Villa Bellagio Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship (2019), a United States Artist Fellowship (2018), a Guggenheim Fellowship and a COLA Grant (2017) and a Creative Capital Award (2015). They have received the inaugural ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art, California CommunityFoundation Grant, MOTHA (Museum of Transgender Hirstory) award, and numerousVisual Artist Fellowships from the Canada Council of the Arts. Their work has been featured in New York Times, Boston Globe, Artforum, Hyperallergic, Wired, TheGuardian, TDR, Performance Research, Art Journal and was the subject of the monograph Cassils published by MU Eindhoven 92015) and their new catalogSolutions, is published by the Station Museum of Contemporary Art, TX (2020). Cassils's work was recently acquired by the Victoria Albert Museum, London, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto and the Leslie Lohman Museum.