Nyeema Morgan is a conceptual artist. Mike Cloud is a painter. They are married and live in Chicago. Artist couples are very common in the art world—there are mythologies built around them and they are the source of endless conjecture. Nyeema and Mike are collaborating on an exhibition, Mike Cloud & Nyeema Morgan: Story Structure, Pt. 2, at the Neubauer Collegium at the University of Chicago, curated by Dieter Roelstraete, and this opportunity seemed to offer a fascinating test case to explore more deeply the push and pull and intellectual exchanges that take place within the dyad of two artists in a matrimonial partnership.

Both artists are also having a high density of exhibitions at the moment, including Morgan’s exhibition take my wife…PLEASE! at PATRON Gallery, through April 25, and Cloud’s exhibitions Hammer Projects: Mike Cloud, at the Hammer Museum through January 7, 2027, curated by Erin Christovale, and Mike Cloud: Worldless Obstruction, at MCA Chicago Works from May 2 through February 7, 2027, curated by Nolan Jimbo.



William Corwin (Rail): What are all the Post-its next to you?

Nyeema Morgan: I’m kind of obsessively doing a lot of letterpress printing on Post-it notes, creating these different compositions, and doing something similar that I’ve been doing in the drawings, which is playing with the margin space—the kind of proposed, neutral margins—but emphasizing them more.

Rail: When did you first start thinking about playing with this idea of the mat and the position in the frame—how that has meaning in itself?

Morgan: It all comes down to framing in these pieces, quite literally, and also in the drawings: thinking about the frame within the frame, and the margin as a frame—this conventional way of composing text or images to draw our focus and attention to a specific area. So, literally and figuratively, these pieces are about framing in the sense of how information is given to us and contextualized, and being very suspicious of that.

That goes back to growing up in the South, being a kid and having parents who grew up in the civil-rights era. We were living in North Carolina in the eighties. There were a lot of challenges, a lot of problems there. My mom, my parents, were really incredulous, you know; they taught my brothers and I that we had to not take things that were presented to us at face value. We really had to understand the subtext and the full context—understand things as having these causal relations, rather than accepting something as it is presented.

Rail: I understand metaphorically as it pertains to information, but as an artist, when did it first strike you that framing and this idea of presenting images can be messed around with?

Morgan: I always did something—and continued to do something into adulthood—that I imagine we all did: I was doodling in the margins of textbooks. Right? It felt very defiant; it felt very transgressive as a kid in middle school or high school to be doodling, drawing, or messing in the margins. It was a form of rebellion and refusing a formatting and standardization of how things were presented. I think that margin space always stuck out to me, visually, as a young art student thinking about the image plane, thinking about space, thinking about figure/ground and any hierarchies between the two. It’s been in the back of my brain, and over time it came to the surface intuitively. There was a moment when I realized this habit—the continual representation of the frame, or undermining the frame, or conventional ways of composing. In the big drawings that I’ve been doing since 2010, there was this frustration I had with my own desire to center the image. I was using this process of enlarging the reference that I was drawing from, because I was basically making these photocopies of book pages with the word “extraordinary”—meaning out of structure, out of the common order. And I’ve been using all sorts of books that have that word, using this labor-intensive process, and using my own really shitty math to enlarge this image and draft it on a larger sheet of paper. In doing so, I was setting a trap for myself, because I could have projected and traced, but I wanted to set these traps to stymie these habits that I had developed and had a hard time breaking. In using that really bad math, it threw the image off the page, because I didn’t really know where it was going to land on the larger sheet of paper. That began the centering of the image.

Rail: So the Neubauer show: was there a prompt for you two?

Morgan: I get the feeling there was a prompt, but I don’t know if the curator, Dieter Roelstraete, followed it. He had asked Michael and I to do a show together last year.

Rail: How have you guys viewed it?

Morgan: I think our work is formally different, but it shares a lot of subjects. We have a lot of conversations about culture, about storytelling. He tells a lot of stories from the good old days of Yale, and then we just watch the news, and we talk about language and how certain stories are being communicated and why, and the instrumental function of telling this story versus that story.

Mike Cloud: I use the frames of paintings as a kind of language—a symbol-making device. But I don’t really think thematically like a curator might, since curators can choose between artists, whereas I simply am me. So I just make art and am. Nyeema and I use a lot of the same themes, like language and storytelling and framing. I don’t think that either of our art really means anything in the way that a lot of contemporary art means things. It more just has aesthetics. So from my perspective, it’s not really a matter of figuring anything out beforehand.

Morgan: Well, when you say, “means things,” I feel like that’s a challenge. What do you mean by saying your work doesn’t mean things the way that other art means things? What is art trying to mean that yours doesn’t mean?

Cloud: Well, I think the greatest kind of paradigm for art making… When I was learning to become an artist—this is like the nineties, early 2000s, maybe up to the 2010s—the basic theory of art was social realism and social practice. This was the idea that you used the kind of intensification of the art making process—where you stack things, one onto the other in order—to express a social truth. That was a reaction against maybe formalism, which came before it, where you were using those processes of intensification and stacking to express some formal truth about beauty or composition or balance. I suppose I am not aware of any social truths, so I’m kind of shit out of luck. And you know, looking at Nyeema’s Post-it notes next to her, I think that both of us are interested in social form, rather than social truth.

Rail: In terms of mechanics: you were asked to collaborate on a show. How have you negotiated the project? I’m asking this leading up with the fact that I’ve heard the audio piece, so I have a sense of what you created. But how did you begin to do that?

Morgan: I think for me there was a trust and a cohesiveness between our respective things that we’re making at the same time, so having the space to be able to show those together was a conversation happening between the works. We didn’t really consult each other about, “Okay, you show this, you show that; that works.”

Cloud: I was thinking that maybe I write a lot of different texts. I have this group of texts which are abstract, racial jokes, where I was taking away the identities of characters and stories to see if it would be easier to understand the moral of the story if you weren’t asked to identify with the main character. That was a text for that audio piece.

Morgan: Is that how it started? I think that came in after we had already started to make the audio piece, when we were talking specifically about pronouns, and then started to change the language a bit too—rather than “she,” “he,” to “it,” to objectify the subject, the artist.

Cloud: I had originally written a piece like that for an interview—a job interview I did at the University of Illinois Chicago, where I removed the pronouns and replaced “you” with “it.”

Morgan: Yeah, you removed pronouns. I feel like you did that maybe in the Helen Frankenthaler workshop.

Cloud: No, it was after that, and it was sort of like Silence of the Lambs, where the serial killer would refer to the woman he had captured as, “it rubs the lotion on its skin.” I write a lot of silly texts like that. I will take art reviews and remove all of the descriptive language. But Nyeema actually uses text in forms, so, like the form of the multiple people reading the “it” being recorded in this iteration for the Neubauer show—“it” having, like, these spatial relationships. That is sort of the collaboration. I do handwriting and stuff in my paintings, but I think that you do—what do you call it, “typography?”

Morgan: Yeah, the authoritative heft of typography and print.



Rail: That’s fascinating that you talk about authoritative typography, and he talks about handwriting.

Cloud: When I was very young in undergrad in Chicago, before I went to Yale, I had a practice that if anybody would ask me for money, I would ask them for their autograph, and then I would try to copy it.

Morgan: Oh, you did that when we just started dating. I remember we were out on the street once, and somebody asked you for money, and you asked them—like, some guy—if you could have his autograph. And I was like, “Okay, that’s interesting.”

Cloud: I started it in Chicago; back in those days, people would ask you for money a lot. But, I never concretized these practices. I just kind of throw away the things. I think that you have a more concrete relationship to text itself—you know, the topography. I like its manifestation now as audio.

Rail: So how do you get to the audio then? And have you done audio before?

Morgan: We had never done audio before. We did this as a commission for the intermission museum of art, which was a collaborative, online project between the Dutch curator Rosanna van Mierlo and John Ros, who’s in New York; they asked us to do something collaborative, which was our first time. Was it before the pandemic?

Cloud: It must have been during, because that must have been the reason it was virtual. I think we have an outstanding collaborative project. I don’t remember if we did it or not—we were writing a sequel to Robin Hood, or maybe we were writing a sequel to Frankenstein.

Morgan: Yeah, that never went anywhere. We worked on it a little in Berkeley. There was a show in Berkeley, and we didn’t do anything with the information, but we were soliciting interpretations of lines of Robin Hood, like line by line.

Cloud: Or was it Frankenstein? I think it was Robin Hood. Somehow it resulted in a proposition about what had happened in the past and what would happen in the future. And the idea is that through that process, we could write a prequel to Robin Hood.

Morgan: We had people from the show actually answer on cards, and they’re still in a box somewhere. We never opened them to read them, but we should probably do that. So that was the first collaborative piece.

Cloud: I think that both of our text works are not narrative, they’re just words—or it’s a URL, or it’s whatever. But when we collaborate, it becomes literature; when we collaborate, it becomes a story. We both only imply story in our work, but when we collaborate, it’s literary, for better or worse.

Rail: The plan was to tell this story in an audio piece using these lines of interpretive text; is it similar to the fragments on the Post-its?

Morgan: It all just started with stories. Michael used to tell these stories—stories about heroes like Mel Bochner, and I would always question, “Well, why?” What was the significance of Clyfford Still? What was the significance of telling these stories to young art students, as opposed to his family over the Thanksgiving table? What was the function of these stories in the lives of young students—in terms of the role of the teller and the identity of the person receiving the story? We’re all artists, and I’m sure we all think about our identity in a greater kind of arc, right? Narrative art, about art. I guess we’re always telling these stories. “I heard Ed Ruscha used to fly planes or something in Vietnam.” So we would tell these kind of folk stories about the lives of artists and think about their meaning.

Rail: And why did it become an audio project, rather than text on a wall or something?
Morgan: I guess things were told; they were oral histories, you know?

Cloud: They’re probably not interesting enough to read. If they were written on the wall, would I read them? No, because they’re the kind of stories that my teachers told me, and I’m a captive audience, so maybe that’s a good reason.

I’m not sure it’s going to end up in the bathroom of the Neubauer, but that’s a good reason for it to be there.

Morgan: That was the idea; that it would end up in these discrete spaces in the Neubauer; that it would haunt the spaces, being activated by someone else’s presence or movement in a space. These are all oral folk arts—folk stories about artists and artists’ identities. I specifically enjoy hearing those stories told to me. Sometimes you would tell the story about Robert Storr or Mel Bochner, and then you would end it, and you’d just be like, “So, there.” I was really interested in hearing people’s voices.

The idea is that we give people these passages that we wrote, and they memorize them, and then we ask them to recite them from memory. And then they have to do that three times, one after another, and you can hear the struggle—the labor to remember, to just recall these stories. And certain things change and shift, like with a game of telephone, so it changes the meaning in some instances to where it doesn’t make sense. And there’s these pauses and this tension with some of the audio. There was one reader, Becky Brown, and I remember she was reading it so well, and there was this pause, and then a sigh, and then “Fuck.” Then she just picks back up into the story. So those kinds of struggles with reading are very important to me, in the same way it is with my other works. The way that I break up text, that kind of reading is a process. It’s a struggle. We’re quick to try to interpret.

Cloud: Yeah, I think another thing I recently was hearing—specifically talking about Black women—is how on the internet, the Black women are not real. They might be like a Russian or whatever, just using an AI image to say these things. And I was hearing about how in disinformation campaigns, the thing that the person is saying is a real thing somebody believes; the deception is not in the thing they’re saying, but in who is apparently saying it. So I think that art is always kind of ahead of its time. I think that our discussion about stories about Clyfford Still and so forth, that our suspicion of those stories is a kind of suspicion of disinformation—of trying to consider the source. When I would tell my students a story about Pablo Picasso, if the student is suspicious of Picasso, then they will be suspicious of the story. So what I would do is figure out what artists they were not suspicious of. So maybe it’s Kara Walker, and I would just change the person in the story to be Kara Walker, and then they would accept the moral of the story because they were not suspicious of her. But I realized that if there were two students standing there, I couldn’t change it to both things. So that’s why I removed it entirely and just called it “it,” or, “the artist.” These are disinformation techniques, right? To remove the source. And I think having multiple people read the story is another disinformation technique, because if you would be suspicious if I said it, well, what if this person says it? Or this person, or this person? Sooner or later, we will get to somebody you believe.

Morgan: They take authorship of what is being said. They usually start with, “I once knew an artist,” so there’s a familiarity there.

Cloud: And why is disinformation so important in art?

Rail: Well, art is, to a certain degree, disinformation: it’s traditionally, historically, a form of reasserting certain images or timelines. Can it be a source of truth, too? Is the sound component the main aspect in the Neubauer exhibition?

Morgan: No. Michael, your paintings are pretty sizable, like, floor-standing sculpture paintings. And then I’m going to use panels, like fifteen of them; and I’m making a fake, inset panel the same color as the wall; and I’m cutting out a square window, similar to what I’m doing with these Post-it pieces with the mat; so the wall becomes a mat with a cut-out window, and there will be either an image or video behind it, with the letterpress print posted over it. There’ll be different compositions all throughout the space. Then the sound piece that exists throughout the building in the bathroom: it will be activated when someone goes up the stairs, and plays very low. And then also there’s the chimney in the main space: when someone walks in front of it, the sound will start to come out of the chimney. We’ll put a speaker up there.



Rail: Nyeema, you grew up with artist parents. Do you think that the way that your mother approached her career, and the way your father approached his career was because of the sort of gender differential in the art world?

Morgan: Oh, I’m sure. My mom grew up in a conservative, religious household, and she was one of six siblings. She grew up during the civil rights era in Philadelphia, as did my father and my grandmother; she didn’t tolerate any frivolous things. But, you know—I didn’t find out till later—my grandmother had wanted to be an opera singer, so there was a tolerance for the arts. My mother played many instruments: the guitar, piano—all of that stuff. And so I was actually surprised that my grandmother allowed her to go to art school. She went to Moore College of Art. But you know, they had kids in their early twenties: they had my brother at 21, which I couldn’t imagine. And I think my mom put off going to graduate school until we were in pre-K or kindergarten. She did struggle with it. I think she struggled with those gender roles of being a woman artist and being a mother as well. I think there was a lot of compromise. I guess that was expected of her—and I’m not saying that my father pushed that on her. He was really supportive of her, but she was also very shy, so I think at times she just kind of allowed herself to fold in or collapse in on herself, or just say, you know, “Oh yeah, I’ve got my kids. I’m taking care of my kids.” Very classic story of artist moms taking the back seat.

Rail: I’m guessing that, Nyeema, you had the support of your parents when you decided to be an artist? Or maybe it was just seen as inevitable. But, Mike, your parents are not artists; were you supported in your artistic pursuits when you were younger?

Cloud: I think I had more of a kind of benign neglect, so I was allowed to do whatever I pleased, you know, as long as I wasn’t in jail or something. I think that being, say, a graphic designer or something seemed like as reasonable a job to them as anything. And I was clearly talented. I could draw pictures and things like that. It was also a different time than it is now. I think we live in a more precarious economic world today than at that time. So in the nineties or the late eighties, I think being a graphic designer or an art teacher seemed like reasonable things to do, but they didn’t interact. I think my mother only owns like one work of mine, which was a poster that they did for the Lincoln Center for Black History Month one year. So that’s pretty hands-off. And my father had a postcard that I did when I was maybe an undergrad, or a little younger. It was like a Christmas card—a Chicago-themed Christmas card. I forget what company it was for.

Rail: And that was where, on his desk?

Cloud: On his refrigerator.

Rail: So then when you met Nyeema and you found a family where this discourse of art was actually part of family dynamics, did you feel like you’d reached the promised land?

Cloud: Well, yeah, her family was very supportive. I can’t imagine the pressure artists must feel when they have parents who are artists, because I imagine they’re not sure if they would be artists if they were discouraged or something like that. I don’t know what the dynamic is, but from my experience of her family, it was nothing but supportive. And her parents are very sophisticated in their understanding of art. They’re both abstractionists, so it’s not like their understanding of art was limited to greeting cards or posters like my own family.

Rail: We talked about Nyeema’s mother and father. What are your perspectives now as a man and a woman in the art world, married? You know, there are these stereotypes or tropes of husbands and wives in the art world.

Morgan: I mean, I feel like I really lucked out: we’re really both genuinely supportive of each other. I don’t think there’s ever been an ounce of competitiveness in our relationship. I feel very fortunate that we have that kind of encouragement. Because, yeah, the tropes—the antagonism and artist couples that people talk about? Yeah, it exists.

Rail: I should have phrased it slightly better, because I know that you guys are supportive of each other. I know there’s not a kind of Lee Krasner/Jackson Pollock thing going on. I mean, at least if there is, you’re hiding it very well. I’m sort of more interested in how you navigate the exterior world, which, even up until now, does position male and female artists in different ways. Do you feel that certain things have happened for one or the other of you, because the world is the way it is? And how do you then navigate that?

Morgan: I guess the things that have happened and the things that we’re doing, I either attribute to the differences in our work, or just the difference in personality, in terms of the things that either one of us pursues or doesn’t pursue. Michael, what do you think?

Cloud: Well, I always thought that being Black artists—especially in the early 2000s, before the art world was even as enlightened as it is now—we shared a territory. So I didn’t think that there were really differences in that. But when I was first starting out in the early 2000s, you would get a lot of calls during Black History Month: people would be putting on shows that have Black artists and stuff like that. But it always seemed about fifty-fifty to me, as far as male and female artists back then. When identity art was just cementing itself in the late-nineties or early 2000s, it did seem to me that most Black male artists—when I would do college visits and stuff like that—were abstractionists, and the women Black artists were embracing more of the concepts of identity art. But I think that evened out over time; and of course, Nyeema and I are both somewhat conceptualists. So I think we’ve always been in very similar pools of artists, although Nyeema is more conceptual and I’m more painterly. So it’s easier to be a painter than other things. I think that has been a big difference. I make paintings like spiders make cobwebs. I’ll just continuously make them, and they’re easy enough to sell. I’ll continuously make these roughly similar objects—as you see behind me, piling up—and Nyeema is more project-based and less concerned with selling a gaggle of objects, to get them out of the way to make more.

Rail: I see them growing behind you even now, as you’re talking.

Cloud: They’re just happening, crawling around.

Rail: I want to talk a bit about each of your vocabularies, or dictionaries, or encyclopedias of symbolism—starting with the Post-its. Talk to me about the Post-it as a symbol. I know you do a lot with print and with books and with the idea of paper-on-paper. How did the Post-it come about?

Morgan: I think in our everyday lives, we’re enamored with these seemingly benign objects and things that are in the orbit of our lives. Reading, taking notes, putting Post-it notes, or being inundated with a pile of dirty children’s clothes all the time. For me, it was really a questioning of all of this material and how innocuous it is: being suspicious of the materials in our lives, these branded objects like Post-it notes. I think it comes down to a kind of suspicion and an interrogation of our use and obsession with all of this stuff and all of this material. I was always interested in using these cultural things as materials for my works, whether they’re book pages or jokes.



Rail: And so similarly, the joke for you is sort of this Freudian seepage of our deepest fears? What do you see? How do you want to use the joke?

Morgan: I’m interested in that fine line between humor and violence which exists in comedy, in jokes. I remember a story Dave Chapelle told once. He talked about this moment where he was doing his brand of comedy, where he came out as a Black protagonist and then came out dressed up as this racist caricature. Every time the protagonist did something, he would come out and do this dance. He said he noticed some of the white crew members were giving the wrong kind of laughter, and so he had to distance himself and just reassess what was happening and how this work was being interpreted. That was just one moment among many—whether it’s a joke, whether it’s through language, or whether it’s through these kinds of comedic pratfalls. My kids would watch Looney Tunes—this was after my mom died—and they were laughing kind of hysterically while the coyote would get into the Sisyphean cycle of pursuit and death: coming back to life and dying, and then coming back to life and dying again. But questioning that fine line again between the humor and the violence—that kind of got woven into my work, thinking about interpretation and how things are framed and contextualized. There’s a lot of framing that happens in my work, whether it’s the “Soft Power” works and their really ornate frames which are very sculptural, or this newer work, with the more modern and simplified white frame, which proposes to be this neutral, non-thing. But it is this framing device that becomes an important part of the work, as do the margins, which are another frame. In the drawings, I’m doing drawings of the title pages of books, not the covers. And so the title phrase—the title page as para-text—is also another type of frame, as are footnotes and bibliography and stuff like that. They’re framing the body of written work.

Rail: Mike—as a corollary, the stretcher is a symbol for you. What have you decided it means?

Cloud: There may be better symbols to use: sometimes I use brooms. I’m saying that maybe I’m using the wrong symbol by using a stretcher bar. So I use brooms sometimes instead of stretcher bars, and those maybe make sense, because normal people use them. I guess I started using stretcher bars maybe in undergrad, because it seemed to me that artists are like time travelers, because we had art history to travel through. The problem is that time travelers would never run into each other, except at really popular moments, like the John F. Kennedy assassination or something like that. And then I thought to myself, “The only other place time travelers would encounter each other is at the store where you buy batteries for time travel machines.” So the stretcher bars and an emphasis on painting store materials—canvas and things like that—is this reference to the place where paintings start all of our adventures through time and space. I guess in some ways, the community of painters is more interesting to me than any adventures we could have through this kind of fantastical space of art history. Does that make sense?

Rail: You mean the community of artists across time, or the community of living artists right now?

Cloud: Of living ones, of right now. I would say that each one of us living painters is more in communion with the imaginary painters of the past than we are with each other. That was something I felt in school, and that’s kind of what the joke of the stretcher bars originated from.

Rail: But you’re married to a painter. Do you feel more in touch with her as a painter, or with the past of painting?

Cloud: Well, don’t threaten me with a good time. I’m not married to a painter, unfortunately.
Rail: Oh, a Conceptual artist.

Cloud: I don’t even know if she originally knew what stretcher bars were.

Morgan: Come on. Come on. My father is a painter. But I appreciate the little digs over the decades—the painter/sculptor digs, you know. He’s always quoting Barnett Newman every time he knocks over something of mine.

Rail: What about the URLs that you used in the last series of paintings that I saw about a year ago at Corbett vs. Dempsey, Mike? What do they symbolize?

Cloud: I don’t know when I started using them, because I go back and forth with things. I remember using them in a 2019 show called Tears in abstraction, in New York, and they reference tragedies. I guess the URLs are a reference to facts. I didn’t initially think people would actually search them, because I wouldn’t. I suspend my disbelief; like, I believe you if you tell me some event happened. They used to be a reference to facts when the internet was more trustworthy in some way—before algorithms, before disinformation campaigns—and they were a way to nail the paintings down so that they could only be about one thing, and not like “the human condition,” or “man’s inhumanity to man,” or that sort of thing. So they’re also kind of a joke about that; like, Guernica (1937) is not about man’s inhumanity to man. It’s about this event that happened on this day in this place. They’re usually explicitly the URL. And you would think that would be sufficient.

Rail: Yeah. But it’s about trust and about mystery; it’s about verifying your symbolism.
Cloud: Well, good luck.

Morgan: Or maybe mistrust. I think a lot of people are highly suspicious of your work, Michael.

Cloud: There’s an internet meme that is an image from Arrested Development. There’s a paper bag in the refrigerator and it says “DEAD DOVE.” And he opens the bag, and there’s a dead dove. He says, “I don’t know what I expected.”