Caitlin Cherry

Caitlin Cherry (b. 1987, Chicago, IL) is an active Assistant Professor in the Painting and Drawing department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, with Fall 2025 teaching appointments confirmed. Simultaneously, she is the founder of Dark Study, a contra-institutional online platform for radical art theory education. Her practice integrates painting, sculpture, and installation to critically examine Black femininity within digital and commercial contexts.

Her academic training includes:

• BFA from School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2010)
• MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts (2012)

Cherry's research interrogates how digital interfaces mediate Black femme bodies as cultural commodities, using iridescent palettes and moiré distortions to mimic LCD screen glitches. She rejects respectability politics to foreground online desire and distortion, creating archival works that preserve marginalized dimensions of Black women's representation. Central to her practice is deploying queer phenomenology to challenge rigid gender constructs, incorporating transgender and non-binary subjects to expand Black femininity beyond traditional categories while engaging with historical reclamation like the Black cowboy legacy in "The Yee-Haw Agenda".

Her recent artworks (2022-2023) reveal a cohesive exploration of Black femininity's destabilization through digital saturation, where brazen sexuality and prismatic color patterns serve as default settings for cultural analysis. The works feature overlapping browser-like compositions of Black celebrities, sex workers, and influencers, directly confronting algorithmic extraction and commodification. Exhibition contexts—from zoetrope-inspired aluminum installations to gallery circuits—demonstrate her consistent focus on the interplay between physical art objects and virtual cultural dissemination.

Cherry's recognition includes:

• Colene Brown Art Prize (2020)
• Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Fellowship Residency (2016)
• Leonore Annenberg Fellowship (2015)

In academia, she mentors students in painting/printmaking while pioneering alternative education through Dark Study. Her fellowships provided critical research funding for artistic residencies, and her work is held in major public collections including the Brooklyn Museum and Studio Museum in Harlem. Cherry bridges studio practice with theoretical rigor, particularly through her analysis of digital culture's impact on Black female aesthetics.

Her studio practice features sculptural extensions of paintings, as seen in the "Womanizer" exhibition's freestanding aluminum circles that created immersive, multi-sensory environments. These installations physically manifest her themes of digital fragmentation and surveillance, queering spatial relationships between viewer and artwork through mechanical arms and layered obstructions that evoke peep-show dynamics while challenging traditional museum architecture.