Art Historian, Textiles of the Ancestral Americas

Kyle is a 2024 McNeil Center Fellow, a 2025 Marilynn Thoma Predoctoral Fellow of the Art of the Spanish Americas, and a 2025 Fulbright-Hays dissertation fellow.

He is a Ph.D. Candidate in the department of Art History at Pennsylvania State University. His dissertation is centered on the techniques of production and ritualized use of textiles for Inca imperial processions. It employs reconstructive techniques to recover the importance of a long-lost textile as a decolonial corrective to the Inca past.

At Thiel College he obtained his B.A. in fine arts and Spanish with minors in art history and sociology, distinguished with highest honors. He served as the Associate to the Dietrich Honors Institute at Thiel for a year before heading to Penn State where he completed his M.A. in art history and has finished all Ph.D. requirements besides his dissertation.

He became enamored with the Andes during a semester abroad in Ecuador at the Universidad San Francisco de Quito while painting the landscape plein air, sculpting ceramics with native clay, and learning about the local art history. Out of this immersive Spanish experience came his fascination with the textile patterns that enliven Quito’s markets.

Kyle is developing an all-in methodology that combines archival, linguistic, archaeological, and scientific methods to interpret decontextualized and destroyed artworks. To this end, he has completed six Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) fellowships to intensively learn three Quechuan languages (Cusco Quechua, Ecuadorian Kichwa, Bolivian Quechua) spoken by the Incas. He is the recipient of a number of internal awards from Pennsylvania State University, a James J. Burns & C.A. Haynes Textile Scholarship from the Rhode Island Foundation, and most recently, a Barra Dissertation Fellowship in Art and Material Culture from the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, a Marilynn Thoma Predoctoral Fellowship in the Art of the Spanish Americas, and a Fulbright-Hays Dissertation Fellowship.

Contact Kyle to learn about his art historical research and local partnerships with Quechua scholars, artists, and organizations!

Anchata kusikunimi ñawinchayki!

¡Gracias por leer!

Thank you for reading!