Kale Doyen

Kayleigh “Kale” Serrato Doyen (she/her) studies modern and contemporary art history of the United States. Through the methodological framework of Black feminism, Kale researches the politics of agency within visual representations of U.S. landscape, focusing on Black and Latinx artists. In her undergraduate thesis, Kale located a small collection of Luis Medina’s landscape photographs in the Art Institute of Chicago’s collection to Belmont Rocks (a queer beach in Chicago), and defended Medina’s subversion of the sublime to depict queer erasure amid the AIDS epidemic.

Kale matriculated into the History of Art and Architecture Ph.D. program after spending a year in the department as a Hot Metal Bridge Post-Baccalaureate Fellow. Through her engagement with Digital Humanities curriculum, she has developed digital mapping projects that leverage analog photography to visualize space. Many of her projects analyze the racialization of space by combining digitized infrastructural maps with historic photographs or those of her own landscape photographic practice. Having completed curatorial internships at the National Museum of Mexican Art, Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, and the 2018-2020 Mellon Undergraduate Curatorial Fellowship at the Art Institute of Chicago, she also applies her research interests to art museum contexts.