Image: Hammer Museum, Los Angeles
Mike Cloud's first solo museum presentation on the West Coast is on view at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, where it opened on 28 March 2026 and runs until 10 January 2027. The Chicago-based artist works through abstraction to address contemporary social and political questions, and the presentation is sized to the museum's lobby wall.
At its centre are three large portraits, which the museum calls "loosely abstracted," two of them commissions that were still to come when the exhibition text was written. They are collaged from everyday printed matter, including paper grocery bags, magazine advertisements and cash, and they sit within the assemblage method Cloud has built his painting around, in which stretcher bars are configured into geometric shapes and objects are embedded in thick oil paint.
Shown with them are works from Painted Clothing, a series Cloud made in 2007 and 2008 out of children's clothing. The museum reads the series as a comment on the relationship between consumer culture and childhood, pointing to motifs such as dragons, fairies and rainbows. Four of the quilts are documented on the museum's exhibition page — Dorothy Costume Quilt Back (front), Mouse Skull and Fairy Quilt, Homerun Mets Quilt and Red Triangle Geometric Quilt, all dated 2007 — each in oil and fabric on canvas with stretcher bars, and each sizeable, from 70 by 72 inches to 104 by 101 inches.
The museum presents both bodies of work as evidence of Cloud's experimentation across printmaking, sculpture and painting over his career rather than as a survey of it. Hammer Projects is the museum's single-artist series; this edition was organised by curator Erin Christovale with curatorial assistant Azul Silverio, and the series is presented in memory of Tom Slaughter, with support from the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation and lead funding from the Hammer Collective.
Two related programmes have already passed: the spring exhibitions opening celebration on 4 April 2026 and a conversation between Cloud and Charles Gaines on 12 August 2026. Galleries are open Tuesday to Sunday from 11am to 6pm and closed on Mondays, and the display is still listed among those currently on view, with almost four months of the run remaining.
