CURRICULUM VITAE (PDF)
(first name: "Kyle", he/they)

​In a culture where vision reigns supreme, identity tends to describe how one sees oneself and how one is seen by others. Visual art not only records and produces identities, but also pictures relationships of power between them. This principle anchors my work as an Art Historian. 

RESEARCH 

​My research investigates how bodies are marginalized—especially those of transgender people and disabled people—and how they have been made to appear (or disappear) in art. 

Deep Cuts: Transgender Histories in American Art after World War II (my current book manuscript slated for publication with the Duke University Press series, ASTERISK, pending revisions) demonstrates the interdependence of art history and trans studies. In this book, I argue that, because gender is itself an abstract idea applied to the body, transgender art history dissolves distinctions between abstraction and figuration that have limited the study of gender and art for so long. For art history, this means recognizing that gender is not located in the visible or material body because it is produced via actions that gender subjects according to the codes of specific cultural contexts. This idea is new to art history, and it will require art historians to disavow the pervasive notion that perceiving the shape of a body can tell you anything about gender in a work of art, design object, or artifact. For trans studies, this positions art, design objects, and artifacts as the very material that makes trans existence possible. Therefore, it introduces iconography—the process of formal analysis (description), identification of material and visual signifiers, and interpretation of what these signifiers might suggest about the meaning of an object—as critical to generating new insights into the ways gender manifests in visual and material worlds beyond fixed and binary distinctions of male and female. Uniting these disciplines will expand the capacity of both fields to explore strategies for living within the persistent crisis of visibility and materiality—or the unrelenting tension between dependence on material and visual signifiers to produce gender and the perilous conditions that reactions to those signifiers create for transgender people. My experience as a trans person initially motivated this work.

My work in disability art history is similarly rooted in my own experience as a wheelchair user and having grown up a sibling caregiver to a person with disabilities. In 2024, I co-curated the exhibition “Robert Andy Coombs: No Content Warning” at the ONE Archives with Dr. Alexis Bard Johnson, which explored the relationship between disability and queerness, as well as the role of photography in changing the history of disability in American art. I am currently at work on a collaborative book project that investigates disability in the history of American art and visual culture.  

My article “Cut and Sew: Gender Expansion through Greer Lankton’s Dolls” appears in the fall 2024 issues of American Art. A second article on Lankton, “Trans Femininity, Temporality, and Kinship in Greer Lankton’s It’s All About ME Not You” is forthcoming in the journal Feminist Studies. In 2024, I was invited by Lanka Tattersall, Laurenz Foundation Curator, Margarita Lizcano Hernandez, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Drawings and Prints, and Arlette Hernandez, Associate Educator, Interpretation, Research, and Digital Learning, at the Museum of Modern Art to contribute interview audio discussing artist Greer Lankton's sketchbooks and video performances as well as paintings by Forrest Bess for the exhibition Vital Signs: Artists and the Body. My discussion of my interest in and research of Bess was also published as an article in MoMA Magazine in November 2024. In 2021, I published the article “Envisioning Non-Binary Gender: The Art of Forrest Bess” in the Archives of American Art Journal. My article, “Chris Vargas’s Consciousness Razing: From Forgetting to Futurity” published in Transgender Studies Quarterly in February 2020. I also co-edited (with Dr. Kirstin Ringelberg of Elon University) the August 2020 issue of the Journal of Visual Culture, which was dedicated to transgender visual culture and revisited in a Roundtable Discussion celebrating JVC's 20th anniversary. Additional publications are listed on my CV (above) and several are available as PDFs on my Publications page.

​In addition to my own scholarship, I am also currently Co-Executive Editor of Panorama, the journal of the Association of Historians of American Art and a current member of the AHAA Board.

TEACHING 

The power of art to understand how, why, and to what end some bodies are resourced while others are not motivates the Art History major and minor that I oversee in the Art and Design Department at Bradley University. My courses range from global surveys of art to special topics courses that address issues themes of technology, identity, politics, and medicine in art history as well as questions about the construction of race, nationalism, ethnicity, gender, disability, and class in the history of art. I also developed and direct the interdisciplinary minor in Museum Studies at Bradley, which gives students majoring in disciplines across campus opportunities to think critically about museum history and apply their studies to careers in museums, collections, and archives. 

EDUCATION

I received my PhD in Art History with a minor in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Stanford University in 2021. I 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. I graduated from Bennington College in 2008 with a BA in Liberal Arts (and a substantial amount of student debt).