Public Lecture: Mike Cloud

Mike Cloud is a painter, associate professor, and director of graduate studies in the department of art, theory and practice at Northwestern University in Illinois. His artistic practice encompasses the expanded field of painting and image-making. He dissects photographic and painterly forms, scrambling text and re-aligning content to produce new breaks in legibility and new understandings. 

His work examines paintings as objects within a broader cultural system of objects, marks, symbols, motifs, and forms. His expressive technique blurs and blends elements into aesthetic compositions that interrogate the politics, contrivances, and language of painting and the artist’s complicity in its system of functions.    

Mike Cloud’s solo exhibitions include Called Ahead (2024) at Fahrenheit Madrid, Spain; Tears in Abstraction (2019) and Bad Faith and Universal Technique (2014) at Thomas Erben Gallery, New York; The Myth of Education (2018) at the Logan Center for the Arts in Chicago; and Special Projects: Mike Cloud (2005), MoMA PS1, New York. He will use his recent Guggenheim Fellowship to develop ‘Holistic Abstraction,’ a new body of research, writing, and paintings inspired by ancient, classical, and religious diagrams of the universe that present modes of abstraction that take a holistic view of artistic ambition.