"The Rainbow Prince: Huáscar Inca's Textile Portrait and the Crafting of Inca Sovereignty, ca. 1450-1572"
Kyle Marini is a PhD Candidate of Art History at Pennsylvania State University. His dissertation concerns the production and ritual use of textiles by the Inca empire. It pivots on an enormous rope sculpture that was annually processed in the foremost Inca solstice ritual and served as the imperial portrait of an Inca emperor. He is developing an interdisciplinary methodology to recover the destroyed rope's construction, appearance, and visual impact across media to illuminate Inca modes of artistic representation. His methodology combines archival research, Quechua linguistic morphology, archaeological field research, technical and scientific analyses of textiles, and experimental reconstruction.
Kyle's dissertation research has been supported by numerous internal awards from Pennsylvania State University in addition to external awards from Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS), the Rhode Island Foundation, the McNeil Center, the Carl and Marilynn Thoma Foundation, and Fulbright-Hays.
For more information about Kyle Marini, read his Fellow Profile.