CURRICULUM VITAE (PDF)

(first name: "Kyle", he/they)

Cyle Metzger is Assistant Professor of Art History and Director of Galleries, Exhibitions, and Collections at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois. Cyle received his PhD in Art History with a minor in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Stanford University in 2021. He earned an MA in the History of Art from the University of California, Riverside in 2015 and an MFA in interdisciplinary studio art from the Mount Royal School of Art at the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2010. He graduated from Bennington College in 2008 with a BA in Liberal Arts.

His current book project--Deep Cuts: Transgender History in US-American Art since WWII--demonstrates how transgender artists and artists who transgress binary gender ideologies have not been peripheral actors in the history of American art but have been central to some of its most recognized moments, movements, and collections since World War II. This book attends to the unique capacities that abstract painting, figurative sculpture, portrait photography, and narrative filmmaking each have for addressing transgender histories. Asserting that aesthetic and material practices have always been central to transgender life and history,  this book also contends that, because gender is so often understood and produced through the appearance of the body, its form, and the materials used to adorn it, the methods of art history have a particularly potent potential to support growing discourse on the capacities and stakes of transgender embodiment. As evidence of these points, the chapters in this book present case studies of specific artists whose works have been shown and collected by many of the most prominent museums and galleries in the US.

Cyle's article "Envisioning Non-Binary Gender: The Art of Forrest Bess” appears in the spring 2022 issue of the Archives of American Art Journal. He co-edited the August 2020 issue of the Journal of Visual Culture titled "New Work in Transgender Art and Visual Culture Studies," and wrote the introductory essay "Prismatic Views: A Look at the Growing Field of Transgender Art and Visual Culture Studeis" with Dr. Kirstin RIngelberg. In February of 2020, his article, ​"Chris Vargas’s Consciousness Razing: From Forgetting to Futurity" appeared in the Transgender Studies Quarterly. This article and his co-authored introduction to the JVC issue also appear in David Getsy and Che Gossett's "A Syllabus on Transgender and Nonbinary Methods for Art and Art History" that was published in the Winter 2021 issue of Art Journal. Cyle also contributed to the second edition of the encyclopedic collection Art and Queer Culture, and he is a contributing author to the forthcoming book Transgender Hirstory in 99 Objects, edited by Chris E. Vargas and curator Christina Linden. He has been invited to give talks on his research at a number of universities and museums in the US and internationally, including New York University, The Courtauld in London, and the Mattress Factory Museum in Pittsburgh, PA.