Cyle Metzger

Biography

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 the Art History major and minor that Dr. Cyle Metzger (he/they) oversees in the Art Department at Bradley. His courses range from global surveys of art to special topics courses that address issues of race, nationalism, ethnicity as well as gender, disability, and class in the history of art. He is working to develop academic minors in Museum Studies and Disability Studies that will further interdisciplinary opportunities for students at Bradley.

Dr. Metzger’s research investigates how marginalized identities—especially those of transgender people and disabled people—have been made to appear (or disappear) in art. In 2024, he co-curated the exhibition “Robert Andy Coombs: No Content Warning” at the ONE Archives, which explored the relationship between disability and queerness, as well as the role of photography in changing the history of disability in American art. He is currently at work on a collaborative book project that investigates disability in the history of American art and visual culture.

His forthcoming solo-book project, Deep Cuts: Transgender History in American Art after World War II, Dr. Metzger’s, engages histories of gender transformation in American art since the end of the Second World War. His articles “Cut and Sew: Gender Expansion through Greer Lankton’s Dolls” and “Trans Femininity, Temporality, and Kinship in Greer Lankton’s It’s All About ME Not You” appear in the respective fall 2024 issues of American Art and Feminist Studies. In 2021, he published the article “Envisioning Non-Binary Gender: The Art of Forrest Bess” was published in the Archives of American Art. His article, “Chris Vargas’s Consciousness Razing: From Forgetting to Futurity” published in Transgender Studies Quarterly in February 2020. He 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. A complete list of publications is available on his personal website, www.cylemetzger.com.

In addition to teaching and scholarship, Dr. Metzger is also currently Co-Executive Editor of Panorama, the journal of the Association of Historians of American Art. Dr. Metzger 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.