Color photograph of a dark skinned man with a long dark bear and wearing a checkered blue and white shirt; he sits underneath a colorful abstract artwork and looks directly at the camera

Mike Cloud

Jules Guerin Rome Prize
February 5–July 5, 2024
Profession
Associate Professor, Department of Art Theory and Practice, Northwestern University
Project title
Holistic Abstraction
Project description

My project explores how mystical attitudes toward color, held by ancient people, fit into modern paradigms of seeing and composing color. I intend to study aspects of color in classical Western Jewish, Christian, and Islamic mysticisms. That research will be instrumental in my creative exploration of visualizing the range of cardinal, sociohistorical forces around me. I will also retrace research from the 1980s by James Ackerman (1952 Fellow and four-time Resident) into Renaissance color theory, which has been important to my teaching and practice as an artist. This will culminate in a body of mixed-media collages using colored pencil, color paper, photography, and contemporary ephemera. These new works will chronicle my time in Rome and construct simple pictorial world histories based on my research. These histories foreground ancient and heraldic strategies of color-coded diagramming with the doctrine of God’s grace as my motive force in world building.