Mike Cloud, Visiting Artist Lecture 2025

Artist Mike Cloud gives a lecture at Skowhegan during the summer of 2025, talking about his painting and pedagogical practice. For Cloud, painting is a contemplation of a skin, of the painted film, and sculpture is a contemplation of a volume that is created by the work. Cloud states how he has always been curious about the discussion of portraiture in a modernist way. For Cloud, greatness in a work of art must be a social relationship between artists. Cloud comments on how Black artists used white art as formal inspiration, but they were not negotiating the social position of the artist, which showed itself in criticism during the 1990s.

Cloud tells the participants that artists know that art has the power to change the world, and there’s an eternal argument about how that happens. Does it happen by teaching people something or does this happen by showing people something? Cloud shares how his work has also been inspired by folklore and mythology, because it teaches him how artists exist to typify strategies of representation. Cloud states that in art, one is trying to stand out against commodities. This is a process called counter-reification. Cloud is aware that artists exist in an oppressive aesthetic: all of our aesthetics are oppressive. Artists are aesthetic free agents and it is up to them to make things that are not like the things around themselves. Sometimes those things can interact with and subvert the oppressive aesthetic, even if it is just for a moment.

Cloud then speaks about how social consciousness is acknowledging in a work of art one’s social position in a world, which can be almost impossible to abstract, even though Cloud tries, however it is automatic in performance because the artist can see their social position because they see it in their body. Cloud has always understood himself as an abstractionist, and the point of abstraction as it was told to him was to make works of art that had no subject. Cloud always think of ways to accomplish that. Cloud feels that the world lacks meaning because it lacks perspective, and this is why he chooses stories out of the newspaper more or less at random to see if he can remove their meaning by robbing them of perspective and make monochromatic paintings by robbing them of a colour scheme. Humour and emotional surplus is another part of the ambiguity that Cloud seeks in his work. This is where the viewer comes to it thinking they will have to do something emotionally, and then they don’t so they have something left over. Cloud ends his lecture by stating that in order for artists to show an alternative world, they have to somehow be from it or in it, but he does not think that is true because he also thinks that everyone lives in a prison that has no outside. There may not be a value in escaping if one can never leave, but Cloud argues there is a value. There is a value in art showing an alternative, and there is a value in artists constantly escaping a prison, if even momentarily.