Mike Cloud receives inaugural Foundation for Contemporary Arts’ Richard Pousette-Dart Award

Mike Cloud

Associate Professor Mike Cloud, of the Art Theory and Practice Department, has been awarded the inaugural Richard Pousette-Dart Award by the Foundation for Contemporary Arts (FCA).

The award honors the legacy of artist Richard Pousette-Dart, a first-generation abstract expressionist painter known for his highly independent aesthetic and personal outlook. Accompanied by a $45,000 prize, the award supports innovation and experimentation in painting and other visual media through the FCA’s Grants to Artists Program.

Cloud is a painter and associate professor of art theory and practice at Northwestern. His paintings and collages explore traditional materials, cultural ephemera, and household items to question the semiotic production of intersectional identity. In his own words, he makes “holistic abstractions” that are “countercultural and anticultural in their aesthetics and politics,” drawing on postmodern attitudes towards the collective unconscious and its social expression.

Read more on the FCA website.