Caitlin Cherry (b. Chicago, IL), a painter of cyber-multitudes, draws on sculpture and installation in her multifaceted practice, coalescing into articulate and alluring representations of Black femininity. Filtering media through layers of digital manipulation, her work draws parallels between Black femmes, frequently commodified and positioned as sexual assets, and the seductiveness of art objects in the commercial gallery circuit. Resisting easy placement in the cultural marketplace of hot-takes—these paintings decline respectability politics in favor of a nuanced and unabashedly sexy assessment of online drama, distortion and desire. Cherry’s work features female figures drawn from an image culture of celebrity that thrives on appropriating these women’s likeness. These painted women are overlaid with cryptic patterns—kaleidoscopic 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 a kind of archival work: they highlight the dimensions of Black women’s representation that would otherwise be lost within the unthinkably vast expanse of dead data.

Caitlin Cherry is Assistant Professor of Painting and Drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She 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 NY, and The Studio Museum in Harlem, among other institutions of note. Recent group exhibitions include: Pace Gallery, Perrotin Gallery in New York, Jeffrey Deitch in Los Angeles; the Baltimore Museum of Art, and The Modern Art Museum Fort Worth. She has had recent solo exhibitions at: The CCA Wattis Institute in San Francisco in 2023, The Hole Los Angeles in 2023, the ICA at VCU in Richmond, VA in 2024. Cherry had a solo presentation at EXPO Chicago in 2025 with The Hole NYC.