Caitlin Cherry

Caitlin Cherry (b. Chicago, IL) (she/her), a painter of cyber-multitudes, draws on sculpture and installation in her multifaceted practice, coalescing into articulate and alluring representations of Black femininity. Cherry received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2010 and an MFA from Columbia University in 2012. Her artworks have been exhibited at the Bronx Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Performance Space, and the Studio Museum in Harlem, among other institutions of note. In 2022, Caitlin participated in group exhibitions at Pace Gallery, Perrotin Gallery in New York, and Jeffrey Deitch in Los Angeles. She opened a two-person exhibition Hello Trouble at Petzel Gallery in New York, and the solo exhibition Max Res Default at Luce Gallery in Torino, Italy. In 2023, Cherry participated in group exhibitions at the Baltimore Museum of Art and The Modern Art Museum Fort Worth, and opened a solo exhibition, The Regolith is Boiling, at CCA Wattis Institute in San Francisco. In 2024, she had a solo exhibition,Eigengrau, at the ICA at VCU in Richmond, VA. 

Filtering media through layers of digital manipulation, her painting, sculpture, and installation work draws parallels between Black femme bodies, frequently commodified and positioned as sexual assets, and the seductiveness of art objects in the commercial gallery circuit. Her paintings decline respectability politics in favor of a nuanced and unabashedly sexy assessment of online drama, distortion and desire. Cherry’s work features Black femme subjects, drawn from an image culture that thrives on appropriating these women’s likeness while rarely crediting their creativity. These women’s bodies are overlaid with cryptic patterns—incursions that refer back to the codes and algorithms that power our media landscape, fueling the algorithmic tools of Black culture’s dissemination and extraction. Cherry’s canvases are engaged in archival work: they highlight the dimensions of Black women’s representation that would otherwise be lost within the unthinkably vast expanse of dead data.

Cherry is represented by The Hole NYC and Los Angeles, and Luce Gallery in Turin. Italy.