Dark Study.

Caitlin Cherry is an artist and Assistant Professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. In an artistic practice that combines painting, sculpture, and installation she addresses Black femininity filtered through the media on which it is viewed and consumed—the screens and interfaces of our phones and laptops. Cherry draws from traditions of art history through an exploration of the protocols of painting, integrating cultural theories on race, gender, class, and the impact of technologies.  Caitlin Cherry received her MFA from Columbia University in 2012 and her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2010. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Providence College Galleries, Providence, RI (2018); Anderson Gallery at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA (2018); University Museum of Contemporary Art at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA (2017); The Brooklyn Museum (2013); and Fore (2012) at the Studio Museum in Harlem. 

Dark Study. is an experimental school centered on fine art and design. We teach art understood through materialism, history, economics, critical theory, philosophy, driven by new technologies. We are experimental in our transparency, in our open methodology and flexibility, in our acknowledgement of the precarity, risk, and failures inherent in pursuing an underserved and underrepresented creative practice. By acknowledging our class positionality, we bridge the production of art and its potential for direct impact on a society in crisis. We acknowledge American colonialism’s deep, lingering imprint on value, focus, and forms of cultural production in our globalized world. Our teaching is left-leaning with a messier relationship to inter-disciplinary investigations. I launch Dark Study. as a nimble, free funded online school that will make an advanced art education accessible to all. 

We take up the work that the university prevents through regulation, intellectual property ownership, and massive debt. We understand students are dealing with the untenability of higher education, the fallout of neoliberalism, and slashed aid and support for marginalized peoples. Education is far from a neutral endeavor; it mirrors and even replicates the very oppressive state mechanism under which it exists. Our educational system serves the upper middle class and wealthy. Further, the university recasts structural oppression as a moral education: to study x, y, and z in a particular manner makes one a good citizen. Empty calls for diversity, a lack of support for first-generation and low-income students — these are some of the many problems at the post-secondary level. We are committed to building a learning program that addresses society point-blank for what it is. Knowledge must be pursued with awareness of the full context of societal systems. Dark Study. will help displaced and marginalized students and professors who have lost faith in the university system. It will also cultivate a new culture of learning that will allow in those who never had access. 

Dark Study. is an online art and design school launched by a group of marginalized Black, POC, poor, precarious and aspiring professors during a time of great uncertainty in our university education system. We will mirror a Masters of Fine Arts program in structure but invite more rhizomatic interdisciplinary investigations and be open to any students willing to engage rigorously. We may end up touching on every discipline in the university to solve a problem art has posed. Instructing online, we will provide a free education for students who have also been pushed to the margins and separately geographically but united in their pursuit for an equitable rigorous education. 

College art education is notoriously expensive and most students come from upper middle class and upper class backgrounds. BIPOC, International, and poor students have had to compromise their lifestyles, choice in school and receive lesser educations simply due to tuition numbers. Tuition is high partially because of college's attachment to real estate. A well-funded Dark Study. student would receive enough funding in the future to afford their own self-selected apartment and art studio space while enrolled, with access to an even more potent faculty body resulting from our omnipolitian presence in different cities around the world communing as a decentralized virtual network. Dark Study. would equally provide a prosperous, equitable wage to its faculty body, who are selected because of their diversity in culture, discipline, perspective, and active social justice engagement which is not what the current university system allows or promotes its faculty to do. 

Dark Study. began in March in the middle of American universities transitioning to online learning as a result of Covid-19. At the time, I was a finalist for tenure-track Assistant Professor positions that for were ultimately frozen, or cancelled. This was also happening to many of my peers in education. I reached out to my friends to alert them that we had to prepare for the worst, that we may be unemployed soon of no fault of our own but because our universities chose to protect the salaries of their administrators over us. I reached out to two colleagues, Nora N. Khan, a critic at RISD, and Nicole Maloof, a Visiting Professor at Sarah Lawrence College, to pitch my idea to start an online school to outmaneuver institutions who struggled to resolve online art learning due to their large bureaucratic structures and aging tenured professoriate. We decided to shed all of the baggage of brick and mortar institutions, and to truly seek to resolve online learning for artists to make it equitable for students who look like us and to make it free. Despite the results of this grant, we are willing to proceed on voluntary labor and fundraising. 

Regardless of my affiliation with any established art institution, I remain invested in education because of my love of engaging students and feeling especially responsible to guide them to a new way of imagining success with my own history in mind. I believe that makers and thinkers should take on real risks and experience failure as often as the triumphs. We should resist conventional methods whenever we see them limiting our imagination. We should also maintain well-rounded lives outside of Study and the Studio to keep the vital energy that is necessary to work. Lastly, we should make a simultaneous commitment to our communities and local politics even if at cost to our individual pursuits. These are the foundational principles in my teaching and now they have become the base layers in the founding of this new school, Dark Study.

My career has taken a nonlinear path. I have exhibited at museums, galleries, and at times lived solely from my artistic career depending on the tastes of the elite that control the industry. There were also equal bouts of working minimum wage retail and factory and jobs in Brooklyn to make ends meet. I learned that seeking out a widespread community beyond the cognoscenti of the arts or order to survive to maintain a grounded vantage point in a dense city like New York. When I began teaching as an adjunct at Brooklyn College, Columbia University, Pace University, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, and University of Tennessee Knoxville my housing was unstable and I integrated this grit and flexibility into my engagement with my students. I eventually advanced to teaching full-time and quickly realized that art education even across many states and different types of educational models, remains a luxury for those already with means to maintain their class position. I have taught for the past two years as a contingent Assistant Professor at Virginia Commonwealth University in Painting and Printmaking, teaching undergraduate and graduate students in both theory and studio practice. 

I teach at Virginia Commonwealth University, a southern, state, R1 research institution. Though its student body is notably diverse, the faculty remains starkly white,  causing tension within our department. I have become an advocate for queer/trans and POC students as the sole faculty member that identifies with these underrepresented communities. I consider it my duty to ensure these students’ perspectives are considered when we govern our school. I have also experienced the department’s tension personally. As a Visiting Professor in 2018, a colleague called campus security because he felt I was a threatening/foreign presence while I was sitting in the classroom where I taught. This incident resonated with my students and others across campus and was not the first of its kind. Students and colleagues alike were moved to protest for greater accountability for the professorate and demand that the school further diversify its faculty. Though I didn’t agree with all of their demands, I protested alongside them, at great risk to my job. Together we advanced VCU’s Diversity and Inclusion infrastructure.

I revel most in my free, non-proprietary commitments and engagements outside of academia and art-making. I am a thought-leader, an academic-influencer, and roving "cultural hub" who has built a following of aspiring students and who seek constant and genuine guidance from someone who has been been in art and education institutions and can critique how they work - be it the museum, university, or the art world. They know that I will enter any space and ask who is the architect because the answer matters just as who populates the space. I will ask the history of a place. I make leadership a practice and not a job and I engage with my audience in the prime-time and the down-time. I teach in the day, and scan PDFS and upload them for free for anyone to access at night, connecting people with knowledge in untraditional ways. My greatest pride is connecting aspiring art adjuncts with job positions (starting as an art adjunct is an insider closed door hiring process) and I have gotten many peers their first start in education even while my own job stability was shaky. I hope to do this more through Dark Study.